Neither Saints

nor Sinners
WRITING THE LIVES OF WOMEN

IN SPANISH AMERICA

Kathleen Ann Myers

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

2003
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 2003 by Kathleen Ann Myers

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Myers, Kathleen Ann.
Neither saints nor sinners : writing the lives of women in Spanish America,
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-515722-2; ISBN 0-19-515723-0 (pbk.)
1. Nuns—Latin America—Biography—History and criticism. 2. Latin American
literature—To 1800—History and criticism. I. Title.
BX4225 .M94 2003
271'.900228—dc2i
[B] 2002071519

987654321

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
For Bob
Preface

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.
—John i (Rev. Std. Bible)

By the early modem period hundreds of women wrote about their experience of the
divine in Italy, France, Spain, and Spanish America. In the Spanish-speaking world in
particular, in the wake of the famous mystic author Saint Teresa of Avila (1515—1582),
hundreds of religious women were asked by their spiritual directors to write about their
lives. They spoke of visionary experience of God rather than book knowledge. Spiri¬
tual directors mixed sincere concern for the salvation of their “spiritual daughters’”
souls with a desire to create new texts aimed at inspiring Christian readers.
The use of the written word to further the Word of God is as ancient as lit¬
eracy and religion. Beginning in the fourth century with the compilation and can¬
onization of certain texts to create the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church privileged
the written word as the physical locus of God’s presence and will and the one “true
Book.” Within a few centuries, a new narrative tradition—the lives of the saints—
was promoted to instruct Christian communities. Written records made of saints’
life stories formed a narrative tradition that was intended to inspire emulation by
listeners and readers. Over time, Christianity equated not only the Bible but also the
narrative lives of the saints with the Word of God. The most popular collection of
saints’ lives in the Spanish-speaking world notes: “The saints’ lives are a sure decla¬
ration of Holy Scripture.”*
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Hispanic world, the hagiographic
tradition had become intertwined with religious women’s own spiritual writings and
with clerical biographies of these women. Scholarly awareness of early modern
women’s spiritual autobiographical accounts has increased dramatically in the last
two decades. Studies often examine these writings for evidence of self-representation
and narrative authority, without regard to the different religious genres and the
church’s requirements for first-person narratives in the period. Other studies exam¬
ine the relationship between genre and life representation, but they usually focus on
a single author and do not place these writings in the larger context of other women
writers and clergy.
In this volume, my goal is to illuminate the different church practices that led
to religious conventions for confessional autobiography and hagiographic biogra¬
phy and their roles in formulating identity. I focus on early modern life writings by
or about holy women (known as Vidas'). The two mam forms of vidas were confes¬
sional, autobiographical accounts written by the women themselves and reverent

*“La vida de los santos es declaracion cierta de las sagradas escrituras.” Pedro de Ribadeneyra,
“A1 Cristiano lector,” Flos Sanctorum, paragraph 2.
viii Preface

biographies (also called hagiographies) written by others about saints and holy people
after their death. I study a single period, continent, and religious phenomenon: the
life writings by and about six religious women living in seventeenth-century Spanish
America. I show the lively interaction between rules for behavior and between women’s
own lives and the church’s reinterpretation of these lives, a process I call “rescripting.”
This approach uncovers the widespread cultural religious codes that established
models both for a life and for the life narrative, and it shows how these were key to
the building of many people’s identity in the colonial period. Looking at dozens of
autobiographical texts, which in most cases are just now coming to light, and at scores
of published biographical texts, we see that religious women played an important
part in establishing a spiritual-cultural colonial power. They were considered icons
of heroic virtue who brought blessings to their cities, to the New World, and ulti¬
mately to Christendom itself. The texts I consider here are part of an intricate pro¬
cess by which women formulated their own identities—identities that reflected
expectations for women, but at times deviated quite significantly from them.
My own process of coming to understand the essential interrelationship between
individuals and the colonial church and society that emerged through life writing
practices began in 1984, when I rediscovered the colonial Mexican nun Marfa de San
Jose’s twelve-volume confessional journals, which had been lost, and the hagiographic
biography about her.* I began to examine why there were so few known writings by
religious women in the early modern period and what the lives of women who lived
hundreds of years ago could tell us. My work coincided with general interest in the
study of life writings by anthropologists, historians, and literary critics, who began
to publish research that filled in enormous gaps in our knowledge about how people
lived and thought in the early modern period. The new research gave us glimpses,
often for the first time, into the lives of slaves, native Americans, and visionary women.
I spent years piecing together the roles of church rules, confessors, and family. As
my ears became more accustomed to the language of religious texts, I began to rec¬
ognize in Marfa’s journals narrative echoes from the life stories of Sts. Teresa of Avila,
Rose of Lima, and Catherine of Siena, among many others. I became aware of the
strong network that existed between Spanish America’s leading church officials and
religious women. Marfa and her famous counterpart Sor Juana Ine's de la Cruz, for
example, wrote for the same bishop (Fernandez de Santa Cruz). Sor Juana was com¬
pared to her contemporary, the infamous transvestite Catalina de Erauso, known as
the Lieutenant Nun (La Monja Alferez). Catalina had audiences with the king of
Spam and the pope. Clearly, these women were central to colonial and European
society. I realized that to understand this intricately intertwined religious, literary,
and historical context, I needed to study these religious women both as historical
subjects and as authors of a growing tradition of life writing.
Looking to critical studies about early modern religious women and their writ-
ings, I saw three general approaches to Hispanic texts. The first is reflected in a group
of pioneering studies or anthologies of nuns’ writings by Asuncion Lavrin (1978),

The manuscript was not cataloged but was in the collection owned by the John Carter Brown
Library, Providence, Rhode Island. See chapter 3 of this book for more information.
 Preface IX

Josefina Muriel (1982), Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (1989), and Isabel Poutrin
(1995). These works exposed us to a variety of authors, although at times they con¬
fused male biographical rescripting and quoting of nuns’ writings with the women’s
own words.* The second approach is taken by a cluster of monographic studies and
critical editions of individual women writers—in particular, Alison Weber’s and Carol
Slade’s studies of Teresa of Avila (1990, 1995), Mary E. Giles on Marfa de Santo
Domingo, and Ronald Surtz on Juana de la Cruz (1990)—and, on nuns in America,
such as Kathryn Joy McKnight’s work on the Colombian mystic Madre Castillo
(1997). These studies examined mystic women’s use of religious precepts and narra¬
tive strategies to gain authority. A third approach has been used in the last few years
as more nuns' writings have been brought to light from the archives and studied as a
corpus. The valuable work of Sonja Herpoel on Peninsular nuns (1999) and Kristine
Ibsen’s study of Spanish American nuns (1999) have synthesized previous work on
the confessional vida genre and the dynamics of authority and added new authors to
the list. Much of this work has been informed by groundbreaking studies in other
areas, such as medieval women mystics and seventeenth-century Protestant and New
French women life writers. (I am thinking here, in particular, of the work by Caroline
Walker Bynum, Elizabeth Petroff, Karen Scott, and Natalie Zemon Davis.)
This book paints another part of this canvas: the role of religious women in the
development of the literary genres we now call autobiography and hagiographic bi¬
ography (vidas). The project brings together a survey of the church processes that
sought to identify saints and sinners—in particular, the processes of canonization
and the Inquisition—with the study of the sacrament of confession, which required
the telling of one’s life story. I argue that the categories of saint and heretic set the
extreme limits for self-representation, while confession served as a catalyst for life
writings. In between the two extremes and through the vehicle of confession, we
see a surprising variety of life paths, among them, those of a mystic, a soldier, and
a poet. In all, I examine six representative women, their writings, and their historical
circumstances.
Although I began this specific project only three years ago, it has been a long
time incubating. My teachers Alan S. Trueblood, Stephanie Merrim, Roberto
Gonzalez-Echevarrfa, Geoffrey Barrow, and William Woolley, and my students Grady
Wray, Kristin Routt, Galen Brokaw, Monica Diaz, Rebecca Marquis, and Mario
Ortiz, among many others, have all taught me how to better hear the voices of the
past. To Nina Bosch I am grateful for her cheerful and efficient help on the prepa¬
ration of this manuscript. My wonderful colleagues Amanda Powell, Antonio Rubial,
Frank Graziano, Asuncion Lavrin, and Cathy Larson all played a very significant
part in the formulation of this project and urged me on to its completion. I am
particularly indebted to Mary E. Giles for her input on this project, to Nina Scott
for many of the translations, and to my readers Mark Feddersen and Kathryn Joy
McKnight, who provided me with valuable suggestions on the manuscript.

*Some twentieth-century scholars have taken biographers’ quotes from the women’s accounts to be
verbatim. Often the citations are altered by the biographers and therefore represent a blending of the nun’s
own words with her confessor/biographer’s. See chapter 3 of this book for a study of this process.
 I have also benefitted greatly from the aid of many archivists and librarians—in
particular, my thanks to Becky Cape at the Lilly Library, the staff at the John Carter
Brown Library, Manuel Ramos Medina at CONDUMEX in Mexico City, the staff at
the Archbishop Archives in Lima, Peru, and Padre Angel Martinez at the Augustinian
Archives in Rome. And, as always, my deepest gratitude goes to my friends, espe¬
cially Jenny, Kelly, Suzy, and Judy, and to my family, the Myers and the Feddersens.
Research for this project has been funded in part by fellowships from Rotary
International, the American Philosophical Society, and Indiana University.
Contents

A Note about the Translations xiii

Introduction j

I Potential Saints
1. Redeemer of America 23

Rosa de Lima (1386—1613)—•The Dynamics of Identity and Canonization

2. La China Poblana 44
Catarina de San Juan (ca. 1603— 1688)—Hagiography and the Inquisition

3. The Mystic Nun 69

Madre Maria de San Jose (1636—1319)—Confession and Autohagiography

II Not Quite Sinners

4. The Tenth Muse 93

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648—1693)—Letters and Learning in the Church

5. The Happy Saint 116

Ursula Suarez (1666—1749)—Rogues and New Saintly Roles

6. The Lieutenant Nun 140

Catalina de Erauso (13928—1630)—Soldiers’ Tales and Virginity

Conclusions 164

Appendixes: Selections of Life Writings in translation

A. Rosa de Lima: Selections from Testimony for the Canonization Process

B. Catarina de San Juan: Selections from Jose Castillo de Graxeda,

Compendio de la vida 133

C. Marfa de San Jose: Selections from Vida, vol. 1 183

D. Sor Juana Ine's de la Cruz: Selections from La Respuesta a Sor Filotea 191

E. Ursula Suarez: Selections from Relation autobiogrdfica 199

F. Catalina de Erauso: Selections from Vida i sucesos zoi

Notes 209
Bibliography 249

Index 263
s
A Note about the Translations

Although the primary aim of this book is a reconstruction of the lives and life nar¬
ratives of a half dozen colonial Latin American women, I include in the appendixes
a sample life writing in translation for each woman studied. The dominant genre is
the autobiographical confessional vida and its permutations, and so the selections
reflect this focus. When possible, the selections center on two significant elements
shared by most of these life stories: (i) the narration of the writer’s upbringing, which
was essential for establishing the Christian background for canonization and inqui¬
sition testimony, as well as hagiography; and (z) the call to a specific vocation, re¬
flecting the idea of God’s will and authority over life paths. A third element, the
moment of judgment, in which a church superior, a confessor, or, often, a bishop
asks for an account of the woman’s life, typically setting into motion the chain of
events that led to a formal, lengthy confession and, later, the writing of the life story
is included in the chapter studies. In the cases of Rosa de Lima and Catarina de San
Juan, we must depend on alternate autobiographical forms and secondhand testi¬
mony (canonization inquiry and hagiographic biography) that filters their own words.
Nina M. Scott has provided all translations in the chapter studies and appen¬
dixes, except where otherwise noted. My thanks go to the following individuals and
presses for permission to reprint previous translations: Jodi Bilinkoff, Kenneth Mills,
and Scholarly Resources for material on Rosa de Lima; Peg Hausman and the Johns
Hopkins University Press for translations of Alonso Ramos’s biography of Catarina
de San Juan; Amanda Powell and Indiana University Press for selections on Marfa
de San Jose; Electa Arenal, Amanda Powell, and the Feminist Press for selections
from Sor Juana’s Respuesta; Nina M. Scott and the University of New Mexico Press
for selections from Catalina de Erauso’s Vida i sucesos.

xiii
IMeither Kaints
nor pinners
Introduction

I t has been a truism of historiography to say that a large part of Spanish America
was conquered by soldiers and missionaries in search of gold and souls. The colo¬
nization of the New World, however, as differentiated from its conquest, depended
in large part on the successful implantation of sacred and secular Spanish institu¬
tions and practices on American soil. The Roman Catholic Church, in particular,
initiated a spiritual conquest and colonization of America by converting native popu¬
lations. As Christianity took hold, Spanish urban centers developed around a central
church or cathedral, and vast sums of money were donated to the founding of monas¬
teries and convents. By some estimates, one in every four women lived in a religious
house in seventeenth-century Lima.1 In addition, printing presses were established in
the two viceroyalties: in New Spain (Mexico City) in 1535 and in Peru (Lima) in 1582
(see figure I.i). The majority of the texts published were religious in nature—catechisms,
sermons, devotional guides, and saints’ lives—and were aimed at shaping a new Roman
Catholic community in America.
When compared with traditional historiography and literary histories from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one particularly popular colonial genre—biog¬
raphy of local saints and holy people—tells a significantly new story. Instead of a
focus on conquest, we see the essential role of holy people in colonization. During a
century and a half, Mexico City produced dozens of sacred biographies of local spiri¬
tual heroes.2 Some of the most popular subjects of these biographies were Spanish
American religious women, who were lauded as exemplary individuals and models
of virtue, and who brought fame to the founding of Spanish rule in the Americas.
Sometimes based on the subject’s own writings, biographers’ vidas detail intimate
aspects of the person’s journey to God. A typical biographer of the period exclaims,
for example, that his subject is a better symbol for his city (Puebla) than the coat of
arms given by Carlos V: “From the time the Handmaid of the Lord entered this city
it had two paired coats of arms: those of the emperor, which ennoble it, and those of
Catharina, which defend it; the Handmaid of the Lord was the most efficient weapon
Puebla had, for many times she defended it from enemies.”3 These biographies are
important because of the new perspective they give to the role of holy people, espe¬
cially women, in the New World. They form a petite histoire for Spanish America and
give insight into how religious women—who are almost entirely absent in tradtRonaT
historiography and literary canons ot the colonial period——wereTm fact, central to
the building of America's Christian identity.

3
Introduction

Figure I. i Map of Seventeenth-Century Spanish America (Courtesy of the Lilly

Library, Bloomington, Indiana)

After a hundred years of Spanish and mestizo chroniclers documenting their

experience of the conquest of America, some seventeenth-century nuns joined the
ranks of nonprofessional authors writing about living in America. Drawing on two
key European religious narrative forms, the autobiographical confessional account
and biographical hagiography, socially privileged white women were trained to ex¬
amine their lives and write about them for confessors who would use the accounts to
guide their spiritual daughters. Later, these unpublished confessional accounts often
became the basis for sacred biographies by clerics that were published in both the
New World and Spain. The biographical vidas were evidence of the important role
of the colonies in the Universal Roman Catholic Church.
Sacred biographies, along with corresponding funerary sermons and devotional
guides, became foundational narratives of the colonization process in Spanish America.
The Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman noted how midcolonial thought and
identity focused less on the economy and politics than on news of its holy people.
As O’Gorman explains, “New Spain is a period in which a nun’s spiritual flight, a
terminally ill person’s miraculous cure, a sinner’s repentance, or a holy woman’s
vaticinations [prophecies] are more important news than the rise in prices in busi¬
ness or the imposition of a sales tax; a period in which a spiritual journey to the in¬
terior of the soul is more momentous than the expeditions to California and the
Philippines. . . . The historian who ignores this hierarchy of period values, might offer
us an exhaustive and well-documented narrative of the historical events, but he will
never penetrate the secret interior of the most signficant even s.”4 O’Gorman’s ob-

f M-
 pA
f^y Introduction

servations are supported by the fact that eight out of every ten works printed in Mexico
l ar|d Peru were religious texts.s Literate families often read these workFaloud to each
other, while others heard them cited in daily and weekly Mass. The texts filled con¬
vent and monastery libraries and were exported to Europe to spread the word about

c\~ the vitality of Roman Catholicism in America. By the second century of coloniza¬
tion, new generations of readers and listeners began a new cycle of reading, imitation
of the holy lifestyle, and writing.

- \
The complexities of the interrelationship between hagiographical narratives and
confessional accounts, and between church practices and individual lives, are vividly
\M
V apparent in the midcolomal Mexican nun Maria de San Jose’s journals as she de¬
scribes her life for a confessor. As a young girl living in the mid—seventeenth cen¬
-1 tury, Marfa recounts, she sat in the living room of her family’s rural hacienda every
evening and listened attentively to the readings of the lives of Catholic saints. Maria,
her sisters, and mother did needlework, while her father and brother took turns reading
aloud the heroic stories of martyrs, hermits, and virginal women who had dedicated
their lives to God. Some saints had sacrificed their lives for the faith and evangelic
missions and, like Jesus Christ, were often subjected to cruel deaths. Other holy people
sought out extreme solitude and penances, hoping in this way to purify themselves
and serve as vessels for prayer and redemption. Like many seventeenth-century Eu¬
ropean and American Catholics, Maria could fly in her imagination to exotic lands
and remote times as she contemplated the saints’ lives. From their examples she cre¬
ated her own spiritual life and path to salvation. Taking to heart the stories’ exhor¬
tation to total devotion to God, Maria and one of her sisters began to imitate Christ
and his saints. In the family’s garden, Maria built a hut where she spent several hours
a day engaged in prayer and penances, while her sister wore a crown of thorns and
walked barefoot with a cross on her shoulder. Although they lived in a world with a
relatively short Christian history and in households filled with native American ser-
vants and slaves of African descent, many families of Spanish descent (m'o/los) con-
tinued the popular European hagiographic tradition. The genre originated in the early
years of Christianity, but it was still thriving—albeit with a distinct register ancTstruc-
ture-—in the century after Luther’s reform had vigorously attacked the Catholic
practice of venerating saints.
Spanish Americans not only read and imitated the lives of Old World saints,
they aspired to promote their own. In fact, Maria de San Jose’ herself became a nun
and wrote her own autobiographical account. Later, her spiritual autobiography served
as the basis for a posthumous sacred biography by a local Dominican friar in an at¬
tempt to initiate her canonization.6 Eager to bridge the geographical and spiritual
gap between Europe and America—between the Old World that boasted hundreds
of years of Catholic practice and the New World that threatened to taint European
settlers’ virtue through exposure to “infidels” and “idolatrous” practices—criollos
sought to prove that the New World was a paradise for a new and pure Catholic
ordepi Local holy people were depicted in Spanish American hagiographies for a dual
purpose: they served as models to emulate and as symbols for the building of a local
history and identity. Significantly, upon Marfa’s death, the girl who had been trans¬
fixed by the saints’ lives and had ardently followed the path of several became a model
 6 Introduction

of holiness for other women to follow and a symbol for New Spain when her
hagiographic biographer describes her as a mystic conquistador for America, one who
helped accomplish a spiritual conquest.7
A complex process emerged out of the central Catholic spiritual practice of
imitation (imitatio) and the inherently repetitive forms this practice took in the saints’
lives. Marla’s story of reading, emulating, writing, and being rewritten as a hagiographic
subject to be read by others, however, is not a phenomenon unique to Spanish America
or to women. Religious sisters in Italy, France, New France, and Spain also took
part in this spiritual/textual cycle, as did male clergy whose designated roles as "phy¬
sicians of the soul” and bearers of the keys to salvation required them to identify
and judge extraordinary women subjects. For the most part, however, it was women
#• who were required to write a history of their lives. A woman’s confessor frequently
$ worked in conjunction with his superiors to judge the worthiness of the account.
Although religious and lay men also served as subjects for hagiographic biographies,
they were rarely required to write the full-fledged confessional vidas that were often
an essential intermediary step for women. Religious men and women collaborated
on this project of autobiography, bqt only male clergy at the highest levels had the
V authority to judge whether the journey a woman described was that of a potential
k 0 ‘saint or a sinner.

A By the mid—sixteenth century, gathering first-person testimony about spiritual

experiences and comparing it to the testimony of others began to be a relatively com¬
mon practice by the church in an effort to control orthodoxy and power. In turn,
people began to internalize the testimonies as a kind of narrative code to represent
their own spiritual legitimacy. As a result, the legalistic structures for determining

Ak spiritual orthodoxy became increasingly apparent in life stories. Becauseany devia¬

$ tion from the models of sainthood required explanation, narratives often used con-
ventional rhetorical forms to describe the traditional path to sanctity, but then argued"

Vt
iW
for a new interpretation of God’s
JSrllgJaTajfraflntfigMiiHriiiWwmiMUrirMufcwfaaH lifl7>lEHiiinnni¥FmwM<id»gtenT»iran.M

This complex situation raises questions about what lies at the heart of these life sto-
will to propose alternative models
..-1-UTinfirilMiminf 11 ll«< IlmilTI HI llllmima lirj.l i ll lurr c j
for _sainthood.

ries, which often contradict official models and practices, and how the church not
6@nly reconciled difference but turned these at times deviant lives into paradigmatic
\jJ^J hagiographic biographies for a new age and a New World.,. /
w L
The Counter-Reformation and Life Stories
-YU—.

v
,p'v Perhaps the core source of inspiration for the life stories we study is the early Chris¬
tian precept of imitatio Christi. The ultimate goal of devout individuals and of the church
was to create lives that imitated Christ. A central tenant of the Catholic faith set
into motion this life-modeling process. Based on the doctrine of the Incarnation,
Christianity avers that God became a man, Jesus Christ, in order to save humankind.
By following Christ’s human example of love and sacrifice, Christians could achieve
salvation. The early saints and martyrs were witnesses to and practitioners of Christ’s
way. Soon they became valid models to follow and were considered valuable inter¬
cessors between heaven and earthf But over the centuries, this simple spiritual pre¬
cept, by which imitations of the holy original produced holiness in the imitator,
 Introduction

became more complex as Christianity spread and Rome attempted to control the
definition of holiness.
By the early modern period studied here, the church and its ministers had come
to disagree about rules for judging a person’s life and what constituted signs of
divine mercy and Catholic behavior. Teachings established by the Council of Trent
(1545—1563) on the sacrament of confession, the rules for canonization, the role of
the Inquisition, and the distinct roles for women and men in the church, deeply
affected the interpretation of holiness and the articulation of self-identity. In the
following chapters I outline the religious ideology and institutional practices that
set in motion a four-part process of hagiographic reading, imitation, confessional
writing, and “rescripting” (or reinterpreting holy lives). I suggest that the process
contains an inherent tension as authoritative “canonized” models and texts of saints
were adapted to particular historical circumstances and individual experience. The
interplay between official models and individual interpretation illustrates how the
narrow parameters of the ideal religious woman were variously followed or refer-
mulated as new experiences led to new interpretations of the standard models for
a holy life.
Within forty years of the conquests of Mexico and Lima, Spain and Rome began
a vigorous counterattack against a more proximate threat than the “infidel” native
American—the Protestant Reformation. The Counter-Reformation reformulated
Catholic doctrines in order to work toward internal renewal and to respond to Luther’s
attack on Catholicism. Prescriptions were given to reform religious orders and clergy,
and new documents reaffirmed the role of the sacraments and the intercessory pow¬
ers of the saints. The Catholic Church not only redefined the importance of these
doctrines, but it instituted ways to more carefully regulate the practices of the faith¬
ful. Redirecting the devotio moderna—the idea that had developed at the turn of the
fifteenth century about an individual’s direct access to God—the Catholic Church
now began to require frequent confession, to prohibit books that promoted indi¬
vidual spiritual practices without church monitoring, and to construct new models
of holiness in which heroic virtue, defined as obedience to the church and active
participation in the sacraments, was a key factor in determining sainthood. As both
lay persons and religious members sought new avenues for religious expression, the
church sought to control and codify them.
When Counter-Reformation initiatives began to clash with individual spiritual
practices, many of Spain’s most notable holy people and authors, such as St. John of
the Cross and Fray Luis de Leon, were brought before the Catholic Church’s newly
revived institution for determining heresy, the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Be¬
sides going after suspects for Judaism, Lutheranism, and witchcraft,jhe Inquisition
attempted to control religious fakery and heretical sects such as the illuminists^
'(alunihrados), who claimed to have direct access to an understanding of divine will
without the need for church mediation. In the 1550s, the Inquisition also established
the Index of ‘Prohibited Books, which banned books that dealt with individual spiritual
exercises. For example, one of sixteenth-century Spain’s most noted saints, Teresa of
Avila, complained that the Index had censured most of the books that she had used
in learning about the spiritual life.9
8 Introduction

As Counter-Reformation practices took hold in Spain and Italy, the main colo¬
nization of Spanish America was taking place. The European prescriptions for Catho¬
lics designated at the Council of Trent were followed in the New World. In Lima,
for example, the Concilio Limense of 1567 and 1582—1583 established rules that ech¬
oed those of Trent, such as the prohibition of public preaching by lay men and women.
During these same decades, the Inquisition’s largest public spectacle, the autos-da-fe,
took place in Mexico and Lima. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the viceroyalties
of both New Spain and Peru were sending stories of their holy people to Rome and
Madrid. And yet, because of America’s radically different racial, geographical, and
historical circumstances, European standards were necessarily localized and often
altered. Lor example, a series of Inquisition edicts, at least in theory, severely limited
the reading of popular Spanish secular texts, such as Don Quijote, in America. And
the majority of hagiographic biographies published in America promoted local holy
people rather than European models.
To understand the relationship between Counter-Reformation teachings and the
production of life narratives in Spanish America, it is helpful to understand the ex¬
treme limits established for Catholic behavior—the saint and the heretic—and to study
the process by which the church examined people’s lives and judged them. In general,
the post-Tridentine church (the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent') created
a more centralized role for itself in the supervision of individual spirituality through
the use of three specific processes: confession, ganonization, and inquisition. All three
processes sought to monitor and promote spiritual orthodoxy. The church set the two
end points for judging a person’s behavior through the codification of sanctity in the
process of canonization and of heresy through the Inquisition. Confession—whether
sacramental or juridical—was the vehicle through which an individual articulated his
or her religious identity. In private encounters during mandatory confessional exchanges,
priests guided confessants’ lives. In church chambers, inquisitors and bishops took tes¬
timony about people’s behaviors and beliefs. Through the public spectacles of an auto-
da-fe and through the veneration of a holy person, the church produced positive and
negative exemplars. Whether a confession, canonization process, or Inquisition trial,
church authorities often required first an oral account and later a written one of the
subject’s life. The Holy Office of the Inquisition required first-person juridical narra¬
tives; confessors asked for full life accounts; and the organization charged with deter¬
mining holiness, the Congregation of Holy Rites, sought autobiographical writings,
third-person testimony, and biographies. Each of these oral and written life narratives
was governed by a set of rules and conventions that evolved over time. (For examples
of these documents, see Figures 1.2 and I.3.)
Although in the early church, confession was conceived of as an infrequent and
public act that could lead to great transformation it became an increasingly private
and frequent act after the Lateran Council in the thirteenth century made it a yearly
requirement.10 Soon, the production of confessors’ manuals began to guide the con¬
fessional act toward an examination of both actions and intentions. According
to the Roman Catholic Church (and vehemently attacked by Luther) as God’s offi¬
cial intermediary on earth the confessor held the keys to salvation. While the Coun¬
cil of Trent reinforced the requirement and frequency of confession, the recent
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Figure 1.2 Canonization Process for Rosa de Lima, 1617 (Courtesy of the Lilly
Library, Bloomington, Indiana)
IO Introduction

NOS LOS INaVISIDORES

C ONTRA LA HERETICA PRAVEDAD* Y A
POSTASIA, EN LA Cl VDAD DE MEXICO; E S TAD OS. Y
ProuinciisJcIa nueua Elpana, nueua Galicia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Yucatan, Verapaz,Honduras,
y las Philipinxs, yfudiftruo, yjurifdicion.por authoridad Apoftolica, &c.

3 R Quc fin enbargodclasmuchasordenes, queefbndadas, para occurrir

ilosgrauesdafios, quc rcfultandc loshbros hereticos, y prohibidos, por los
Cathalogos del Santo Officio, y deque noeficncxpurgados, los queconfbr-
mcalnucboexpurgatoriofcandcexpurgar, nodcj.indccntrar cn eitos Rey-
losmochos librosprohibidos, ni los li breros, ylasdcmaspeifonas cuidan,
[dc haze r !a expurgation de los quc han dc firexpurgados, cano efta ordciudo
fehaga. Portantoporel tenor dc la pre fence mandamos, quc detrodefiisme-
fisquefiqucntcndcfdccldiadelapublicaciodeeftcEdiiflo.tengaiilos !ibre¬
eds, y lasdcmaspcrforus(dequalquicrgrado,dignidad, o pchemincncia q
fian]obligadondeexpurgar los librosque tubiercn.ycftaumandados expurgar. Ypafadoefte teimino, y
hallancbfilesfin laexpurgacion, lospierdan, y feancondenados por cada autor, cn cinq cntnducados, )'
| os quc no fucren ii breros, y fc les hallarcn los d chos libros por expurgar, los pierdan, y efto, demas y a-
liendcd: las penas, y ccnfuras pueftas por el Cathalago, y Appendix decile SantoOfficio. Y quc dc aqu i
adclante, no pueda ninguua delasdichaspcrfonas, meter los libros, quetubieren qualquicra cxpurgacib
eneftosReynos, nicnningunpuertodellos, finoeftando expurgados fopenade tencrpcrdidoslosdichos
libros,y dc ducientos ducados por cada vez. Y debajo dc las dicnas penas mandamos a los Comiflarios,
CaliGcaJorB», y «*■ pcrfcmas,qiic Uizjeicu ia dlcliaxipmgacicMr»qucton ulcuidadoaiicrrcn loqucfc
expurgate que nofe pueda leer en ninguna manera-
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MANDAT O A LOS L1BREROS- Y luego comicwja T O DO S LOS QVEHA-
ZEN Ob I CIOS DE L1BREROS, &c- Mandamos, que demas de cl memorial, quetie-
nen obligation to; dtehew libretos dt hazer al principiode cada ono, la tengan tambicn, dcanadirenel
inuenurio todoslos libros que entte ano enttaren en fu poder, como no fian de losmcfinosque eftan pu-
eftos enel dicho inuemarto, y quc defpucs de eferitos end no los pucdl vcdcr,fin mofttarlos a la per Iona
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dozediasdelmesdeIumqdemil,yfiisdcntos,yyeinte yvnanos. " [

Figure 1.3 “Nos los inquistdores,” Edict of the Mexican Inquisition, 1621 (Courtesy
of the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana)

innovation of the confessional box allowed for a more private experience and a more
detailed accounting of thoughts, as well as deeds. As the priest guided the confessant,
often with a series of provocative questions about sexuality and faith, the confessant
was encouraged to interpret his or her own story in light of church codes for Chris¬
tian behavior. New confessional practices led to the development of a formal system
of introspection.11
As the process of confession became more complex, individuals began to pre¬
pare for confession by taking notes and using confessional guides as a narrative
matrix. ^ The colonial Spanish American women studied in this book call these lri-
formal notes cuentas de conciencia. They were used as an aid to confession and even in
lieu of confession when the confessor was absent. At a significant turning point in
an individual’s life—particularly after taking a vow as a religious, beginning to work
with a new confessor, or having experienced a prolonged period of visionary activ¬
ity—an individual might be asked to make a general confession, one that included
 Introduction

the origins of a call to a holy vocation. The confession often started with birth and
childhood and ended at the present moment of the confession. This spoken account
could be followed by a formal written report of the life story, variously called a vtda
espiritual or a confessional vida, which evolved into the predominant narrative form
used by early modern women to write about their lives. These confessional vidas care¬
fully negotiate the codes for confession and feminine behavior.
Until recently, post-Romantic readers often failed to read these narratives as
part of a sacramental process in which the value of the author’s life was at stake. As
a result, these readers did not understand that religious women wrote highly codi¬
fied narratives that guided the confessor’s interpretation and judgment of the ac¬
count. New scholarship demonstrates how we have at times been reading texts like
Teresa of Avila’s “canonized” Libro de la vida (1588) in the wrong genre, as a post-
Romantic autobiography. As Carol Slade demonstrates, Teresa’s vida both responds
to the requirements of juridical confession for the Inquisition, such as information
about family genealogy and the nature of visionary activity, and alters them by in¬
corporating narrative elements from a previously canonized life model, St. Augustine
and his own Confessions.I3 Kate Greenspan suggests that, in fact, most medieval reli¬
gious women wrote “autohagiographies.”14 These accounts frequently discuss the
saints’ lives that autobiographers read in their youth, which often became the indi¬
rect narrative model. The confession of sin became a didactic confirmation of God's
grace and goodness in the subject’s life and a story of her doctrinally pure response
to those divine gifts. Confessional accounts often were informed by the rules estab¬
lished by the Inquisition and canonization.
The Catholic Church established the Holy Office of the Inquisition in order to
“defend the faith.” Although it was first instituted in Spain during the thirteenth
century, the Inquisition was reestablished by the Catholic monarchs, Isabel and
Ferdinand, in 1480 to help unify the kingdom and to preserve orthodoxy among re¬
cently converted Jews. By the mid—sixteenth century it actively persecuted a number of
heretical groups, most notably Protestants (lutheranos) and illuminists (alumbrados). Soon
the Inquisition was transferred to America, and by 1571 it was formalized with the
founding of two tribunals—one in Mexico City, the other in Lima. Unlike its Span¬
ish counterpart, however, the New World Inquisition was relatively ineffective at
completing its charges: to protect religion and culture against heresy and immoral
behavior. Native Americans (more than 75 percent of the population in Spanish
America) were exempt from the Inquisition’s rulings, and it was impossible for the
two tribunals to control the vast territory that stretched from modern-day north¬
ern California to the southern reaches of Chile. In fact, as one scholar notes in her
study of women denounced to the Mexican Inquisition, only 6 percent were actu¬
ally tried (“processed”);15 in general, the charges were dropped. As we will see in
chapter 2, the Inquisition exercised more control over the cultural production of
books—but even then, restrictions and prohibitions were often unevenly met. None¬
theless, the threat of being tried, or even informally examined by the Inquisition,
was enough to motivate many people to internalize the codes that distinguished or¬
thodox practice from heterodoxy. The information a witness gave and the words
used to describe his or her life and spiritual activity often followed norms published
Introduction

in guidebooks and edicts about what constituted good Catholic practices and cus¬
toms (buenas costumbres).
Whether it was an informal examination or a formal confession taken from an
imprisoned individual after being denounced, statements made to the Inquisition
generally moved from information about the confessanf s age, place of residence, and
profession to a genealogy of the family and proof of Catholic training and educa¬
tion. Inquisitors also frequently asked for a more general story of the subject’s life (a
juridical confession) and then followed up with more specific questions about spiri¬
tual practices and contacts. The juridical confession was a parallel to the penitential
sacrament of confession. Because the subject typically was not informed of the charges
made, the confessant had to respond to imagined accusations. Interrogation about
spiritual practices often focused on exposing Jewish practices or alumbrado tenden¬
cies.16 The questions and responses were documented by a notary and usually wit¬
nessed by at least one other church official.
The process of canonization—of recognizing sanctity, a quality of living that was
similar to that of Jesus Christ—falls at the other end of the spectrum of church prac¬
tices for defining Catholic behavior. The role of the saints had always been key to the
promotion of Christianity from its earliest years. These exemplary individuals inspired
others to imitate Christ and were believed to possess intercessory powers between man
and God. First recognized in the early church by local public veneration, by the thir¬
teenth century, the process of proclaiming a person worthy of canonization became
more formalized and was reserved for the Holy See. The Council of Trent increased
the requirements for sanctity, and a few years later, in 1588, the process became yet more
bureaucratic and centralized with a ruling that required all canonizations to be over¬
seen by the Congregation of Holy Rites. Cases now had to include materials and wit¬
nesses that proved the candidate’s heroic virtue and documented miracles. Ecclesiastical
tribunals set up trials (procesos) with judges, advocates, and witnesses to try the cases of
potential saints. Soon after, Pope Urban VIII further codified the canonization pro¬
cess (1623—1644) with more rulings about when a candidate could be considered and
how biographies presented the life of a holy person. The construction of sanctity be¬
came an increasingly elaborate and centralized process. By controlling the type of saint
venerated, the church hoped to further control the spiritual activity of its faithful.
The narrative codification of sanctity is most clear in the hagiographic produc¬
tion of life stories about saints and individuals being promoted for sanctity. The
church authorized certain types of narratives and information while censoring oth¬
ers. The church’s campaign after the Council of Trent focused on saints who illus¬
trated doctrinal purity and heroic virtue more than the performance of numerous
miracles. The hagiographic campaign emphasized narratives that seemed more his¬
torical, based like humanist histories on documentable facts. Urban VIII’s reforms
of the canonization process further codified these requirements.

Religious Women and the Church

For our purposes, it is important to note that the increased control over the definition
of official sanctity and the producnqmafhagiographic narratives resulted in a yet more
 <v
Introduction i3
/ Cy^

narrow area of sanctity allowed for women. Peter Burke notes post-Tridentine require¬
ments resulted in far fewer canonizations, the demotion of saints who contradicted
new models, and the promotion of mystics associated with religious orders.17 Weinstein
and Bell observe that only 17 percent of all saints were women, but of these 40 to
50 percent were mystics.1®5 Mystic piety revitalized the reader’s own love for God,
while "the saint s association with a religious order ensured that individual spiri¬
tual experience was guided toward the collective good of Catholicism (and pro¬
moted the religious order). Official models of sanctity greatly influenced the
hagiographies of contemporary noncanonized individuals in America and religious
women’s own self-portraits. 5 T
As Gerda Lerner, Jo Ann McNamara, Elizabeth Petroff, and Caroline Walker
Bynum have established, in the middle ages one of the few avenues of power within
the church open to women was that of the visionary.19 Theories about the physi-
cal and spiritual capacities of men and women led to a belief thatTvomefTwere
important conduits for divine will. By the period of the Counter-Keformatiop, '
Catholic teachings about individual spirituality were highly gender-specific. While
men could engage in a wide range of religious roles that" would lead to Holiness,
women’s options were limited. The variety of possibilities for religious men re¬
flected the variety of social roles they could engage in: they could live cloistered in
a monastery or out in the world as priests, missionaries, theologians, and bishops.
According to mystical guides, men often pursued truth through the intellect, whereas
women pursued truth through love. Marfa de San Jose”s biographer explains that
women tended toward emotional states (incendios), whereas men tended toward
reasoned discourse (discurso).20 By training the faculty of the will to love God, women
could become more virtuous (“virile”) and were said to have manly hearts (corazones
varoniles) or to be manly women (mujeres varoniles). This active preparation could
then be met with God’s divine grace in the form of visionary experiences. The
affective path was highly valued by the church, as a sermon preached in Marfa de
San Jose’s Augustinian Convent of Santa Monica declared: Saint Monica rivaled
her son Augustine because she experienced God through tears of love, while he
used the intellect to love God.21
.A belief in the value of experience over theory and speculation lies at the heart
of mysticism. By decreasing the reliance on the three faculties of the soul—reason,
understanding, and will—the mystic sought to become like Christ through the use
of her senses and higher faculties, especially through love. But only God could grant
the rare gift of mystical union—of transforming the soul and uniting with him.
Participating in the sixteenth-century rift between letrados (often scholastics) and
experimentados (relying on direct experience), the Hispanic mystic movement involved
both men and women. But women in particular found mysticism an important
avenue for spiritual expression, no doubt because the letrado route was generally closed
to them. Many religious women desired to be mystics, and many had visions that
could either aid or hinder their spiritual progress. Yet according to Catholic doc¬
trine, true mysticism requires God’s grace and few visionaries actually become mys¬
tics. As we will see in the chapters that follow, as confessors, inquisitors, and canon
lawyers examined testimony about spiritual practices in an attempt to distinguish
Introduction
t' $ t/

the true mystic from the false visionary or alumbrada, they asked women to detail in
oral and written accounts their religious experiences and lives.
Mystics and visionaries could both help and hurt the church. As highly affec¬
tive experiences, mysticism and visions could inspire others to renew their faith. But
as highly individual experiences, it could threaten the church’s authority. Therefore,
the Counter-Reformation established a system of controls that influenced most vi¬
sionaries. Because women were considered to be more open and available to divine
contact through visionary experience, as well as more vulnerable to temptation of all
sorts, they were closely monitored by clergy. To better control religious women’s
spirituality, the Counter-Reformation required nuns to take a vow of perpetual en¬
closure, and, in theory at least, began to limit the spheres of influence of beat as, lay
religious women who had devoted their lives to God but still lived “in the world.”
This careful restriction of religious women’s roles extended into the confessional and
the production of written confessional accounts. Nuns like Teresa of Avila and Marfa
de San Jose were often escritoras por obediencia, required to write in obedience to a con¬
fessor or another clergyman, who would then determine the orthodoxy of their spiri¬
tual practice. Confessors looked, in particular, for evidence of heroic retreat from
the world, penitential practices, obedience to the church, and personal knowledge of
God that had not been learned from books.
Orthodox visionary experiences had important consequences when women began
to write their own autobiographies. Such experiences were clear evidence of the di¬
vine hand at work in a humble life. Whereas church fathers had recourse to books
for judging their spiritual daughters, these visionaries used their own experience of
the divine as their source of knowledge—and their authority. Teresa of Avila’s writ¬
ings about the mystic path—and her Libro de la vida, in particular—allow us to see
how her mystic experience ultimately served as the cornerstone for creating a church-
approved life and narrative. Throughout her narrative she posits the authority of
her own direct experience of God and prayer over that of poorly trained confessors
who would condemn her spiritual path. She even argues that because some of her
favorite spiritual guides had been put on the Index of Prohibited Books, she had no
recourse but to listen to God himself: “When they took away many books written in
the vernacular, so they would not be read, I was very sorry, because some of them
gave me pleasure, and I could not read them in Latin. But the Lord said to me, ‘Don’t
be distressed, I will give you a living book.’”22 Using a subtle manipulation of con¬
ventional topics of ignorance, humility, and obedience and the hagiographic unfold¬
ing of a soul’s call to God, Teresa details her method of prayer, her work with different
confessors, and the divine mercies God had granted her. Teresa’s strategy for con¬
vincing doubtful clergy of God’s presence in her life was a success. Although the
Libro de la vida passed in and out of the hands of the Inquisition for a period of time,
by 1622 Teresa was canonized and many of her writings had been published. Her life
writings galvanized Catholic women to follow her instructions for prayer and to
imitate her as a literary model for their own journals. Teresa became the archetype
for religious women writers. She was an instrumental figure in all but one of the
women's life paths and writings discussed in this volume.
 Introduction

The authority for these women’s texts came from their individual experience of
God, from the confessor’s request for a narrative, and from their use of hagiographic-
confessional genre as established by Teresa. Life narratives had both sacramental and
doctrinal implications. Linking an account to this specific genre type was not just lit¬
erary play; it was essential to personal salvation and to the promotion of church agen¬
das. Narratives required specific structures and rhetoric. Religious-literary genres—
whether confessional vidas, hagiography, or sermons—focused the material narrated,
the reader’s expectations, and the ideological ends of the account. A multileveled sys¬
tem for representing and judging sanctity and heresy created a surprisingly rich range
of feminine vidas in Spanish America.

Spanish American Lives and Life Stories

This volume examines six representative seventeenth-century women whose lives and
life narratives serve as case studies that illustrate how a single church role for women to
be saintlike perfecta religiosas in fact generated multiple life paths: America's first official
saint wrote poetry, a Hindu slave prophesied royal succession, a mysticTound herself
preaching to a town of blacks, a nun wrote copiously about love, another nun delighted"
in deceiving men, and a girl fled the convent to become a soldier. In addition, 1 show
how these women s lives an cTtexts wereTntegral toTKeTuiI^ngof colomaTsoaetyrmost
of them were heralded as symbols of America. I have chosen these six women as sug¬
gestive of the possibilities found in colonial Spanish American women’s life writings.23
While they include both several of the most famous and a few relatively unknown re¬
ligious women, taken together they represent the range and interrelatedness of women’s
life representation. The six included here share a core set of historical, social, and ge¬
neric circumstances, but they work through them in very different ways.
To reflect this diversity of life paths and writings within a single institutional
model, I have organized the book into two parts. Part I examines three women, two
lay holy women and a nun, in order to elucidate the inner workings of the processes
of canonization, inquisition, and confession vis-a-vis the visionary woman. In all three
cases, we see how local veneration of holy women could later lead to conflicting official
interpretations about the sanctity of the subject; they often became the focal point
of church and civic debates. In addition, we see how the confessional process was
the cornerstone upon which inquisitors and hagiographers would build their cases
about the subject’s spiritual life.
Part II studies three women who spent time in the convent, but instead of being
exemplars of heroic virtue, they are women who in one form or another redefine—
or reject completely—the path of the peifecta religiosa. Although none was questioned
by the Inquisition or considered for canonization, all three at one point in their lives
had to temporarily curb their nonconforming activities because of punishments im¬
posed on them by bishops or archbishops. All three write accounts about their lives,
and they do so at least in part by adapting the confessional vida.
Chapter i examines the saint-making process of America’s first saint, Rosa de
Lima (1586-1617). Through a reconstruction of her life story as an ascetic third-order
16 Introduction

Dominican in Lima and an examination of the vicissitudes of her canonization pro¬

cess from 1617 to 1691, we glimpse the often inconsistent observation of rules for
sainthood in the century after the Counter-Reformation had revised the Catholic
Church’s official guidelines for sanctity. In many ways, Rosa’s choice to remain out¬
side the convent as a lay religious woman and to follow extreme penitential practices
reflected a largely unchanged expression of feminine affective piety from that of the
popular medieval model St. Catherine of Siena and directly undermined the Counter-
Reformation’s attempts to curb individual spiritual practices and to cloister women.
How was it that a woman whose life in many regards contradicted the Council of
Trent’s recommendation that religious women be enclosed in convents and prac¬
tice moderate penances was America’s first saint? By examining the canonization
processes of 1617 and 1630, several hagiographic vidas, reports on an inquiry by the
Inquisition, and Rosa’s own works, we will see the strong interrelationship between
politics and sanctity, between the interviewing of witnesses and the writing of
official hagiography, and between spiritual guidelines and life practices. A desire
to disassociate Rosa from several followers who were being examined by the Inqui¬
sition for evidence of alumlradisimo, combined with new rules for canonization in the
first half of the century, heavily influenced the representation of Rosa’s life story for
future generations.
Chapter 2 looks at the subject of a hagiographic biography, Catarina de San Juan
(ca. 1607—1688). Her case reveals more about post-Tridentine guidelines on sanctity
and their textual representation. In addition to the Congregation of Holy Rites’ rules
for holiness and hagiography that I study in Rosa’s case, I examine the rules set out
by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for books and doctrinal purity. Catarina de
San Juan was in some respects like Rosa. She was a lay holy woman. Although first
brought to America as a slave, she was central to local citizens’ lives because of her
intercessory powers. Upon her death in Puebla, she had throngs of followers from
all walks of life and was promoted by the powerful Jesuit order. In fact, one eager
Jesuit wrote a hagiographic biography of Catarina that would become the longest
work published in the colonial Americas—Alonso Ramos’s De los prodigios... (1689,
1690, 1691). New Spanish clergy further advanced her cause by heartily approving
the three-volume tome, while the laity began to venerate a painted portrait of her.
Soon, from the other side of the Atlantic, the Spanish Inquisition attempted to sup¬
press her developing cult and prohibited further publication and reading of her biog¬
raphy. Significantly, the Mexican Inquisition seems to have ignored the Spanish ban
for four years. Catarina de San Juan s case, like Rosa’s, illustrates the contradictions in
the interpretation of holiness and heresy and the myriad of mitigating factors that—
depending often on sudden changes in policy, leaders, and power struggles—could
catapult a sinner into an elevated status or send a saintly person to the Inquisition’s
jails or narrative oblivion.
The last chapter m this triad of saintly women focuses on the Mexican nun Marla
de San Jose (1656-1719). Here I investigate a third important institutional practice
that shaped the outcome of many lives with similarly paradoxical results: the role of
confession, both as a sacrament promoted by the Council of Trent and as a practice
for religious women that could produce autobiographical and biographical life
 Introduction 17

stories. The extensive confessional journals and Stations of the Cross (a guide to
Christ’s Passion and death) written by Maria and her posthumous biography by
Sebastian Santander y Torres serve as the basis for this study. As we saw in the opening
pages of this introduction, if ever there was a woman who longed to be a saint, it was
Madre Maria. As a mystic and founder of a prestigious reformed convent, she
carefully followed the path of the model nun, the perfecta religiosa. The unusual va¬
riety and length of her life writings are a valuable tool for tracing the interdepen¬
dent roles of nuns and confessors, of escritoras por obediencia and clerics who judged
and at times rewrote the life story for didactic purposes. The history of Catholic
confession and hagiography inform the structure and ideology of Maria’s spiritual
writings. Her writings reveal a central tension between “canonized” church texts and
learned authorities and individual spiritual experience, often “authorized” by divine
intervention. Maria de San Jose illustrates the delicate process of simultaneously
casting herself as repentant sinner and chosen saint, and she carefully negotiates a
path between self-will, divine will, and the confessor’s will. She became a visionary
scribe, an unofficial medium for the divine word, which she passed on to her confes¬
sor, as her official intercessor between heaven and earth. Maria’s accounts reveal the
dynamics of a profoundly gender-specific role as a mystic woman author. We see
how her story was recast by clergy to represent the new spiritual conquistador, as
evidence of the flowering of Christianity in America. In summary, Part I presents
women who were promoted by the institutional church—at least locally—as poten¬
tial saints, regardless of race or religious status.
Part II looks at the creation and reworking of established rules and genres to
effect very different outcomes on the lives of the women and their texts. Each of the
three women studied in these chapters created a hybrid text that blends elements
from the confessional vida with other first-person narrative genres in order to defend
an alternate path to God. The use of the vida form was essential because the church
demanded it. And yet, these women subverted the form by using irony, satire, and
^parody, as well as the competing ideologies borrowed from such secular narrative
structures as the picaresque narrative and soldier’s story. Despite diverging from the
y
modeTchurch script, upon theifdeaths two women were “rescripted” by clergy into
accounts that borrow hagiographic elements. While neither was promoted as a po¬
tential saint per se, they both were co-opted for the building of America’s fame. They
were rewritten as curiosities (casos singulares), as examples of extraordinary women who
overcame the limitations of their sex to become more varonil and, therefore, worthy
subjects of biographical narratives in a different light.
Chapter 4 surveys the autobiographical writings of Spanish America’s most fa¬
mous nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648—1695). In a series of letters to New Span¬
ish clergy from 1682 to 1691, Sor Juana used the epistolary genre, the letter, to define
her own role and beliefs about religious vocation vis-a-vis church authorities and
texts. Highly structured as a genre by the seventeenth century, the letter could serve
as a public or private document and as a legal or spiritual aid. It is only with the
most famous of these letters, the Respuesta to the bishop of Puebla, however, that Sor
Juana combined the rhetorical possibilities of the letter with those of the confes¬
sional vida. She redefined the model nun to be one who used God s gifts, which in
 Introduction

the case of the intellectually gifted meant following a life of study,. Because the path
to salvation required using one’s gifts, the perjecta religiosa for Sor Juana became the
religiosa letrada, a learned nun. Such an audacious rewriting of the traditional role, genre,
and ideology for nuns provoked a crisis. It appears lhat the archbishop of Mexico _
commanded Sor Juana to sell her library and renew her religious vows. To change
tjae influence of her story on others, upon her death he ordered a hagiographic biog¬
raphy written about her. In so doing, he effectively turned a rebellious daughter of
hvjes

the church into a more saintly, noncontroversial nun. We learn from this, once again,
how high the stakes were in the church’s rescriptmg of its extraordinary women's
lives. Relatively new archival finds suggest that while ,Sor Juana was subjected“to~
pignitive measures, she unofficially continued her literary career, and several church-
men continued to support her. As in the case of the lives studied in Part I, there was
no unilateral clerical response to Sor Juana’s case. That the image of Sor Juana spend-
ing her final days with scourges and prayers instead of pens and hooks endured until
the mid-1990s tells us much about thejpowerful effect of official church narratives
on our perceptions of women.
Sor Juana’s TTTI ean counterpart, the talented nun Ursula Suarez (1666—1749)
employed humor in the account of her call to the religious life. In chapter 5 we study
Ursula’s use of humor to criticize norms that dictated women’s subordination to men
and that made many—whether as wives or nuns—economically dependent on men.
Writing a vida at the behest of her confessor, Ursula employed the convention of the
divine call and authorship, but only to redefine sanctity: she quotes God as saying he
gave her a good wit and that he wanted an entertaining actress and preacher among
his saints. Just as Sor Juana had reworked the vida genre by combining it with the
epistolary tradition, Ursula wove into her narrative elements from popular litera¬
ture, in particular the scenes and ideology from picaresque tales. Ursula’s style is so
strikingly different from that of a nun like Marfa de San Jose that it raises the ques¬
tion of how Ursula managed such open attacks on men in general and their treat¬
ment of religious women in particular without being censored. Although Ursula was
punished by one bishop, she was later promoted to abbess. Significantly, however, it
seems that upon her death, no church official stepped forward to recast her life as a
saintly one deserving emulation. Perhaps living in relatively provincial Santiago and
in the mid—eighteenth century affected her account and her chances of being used as
the subject of a posthumous biography.
In chapter 6, the questions raised by the differences in time, place, and form in
Ursula’s and other nuns’ accounts are heightened by the more dramatic divergence
of the Lieutenant Nun (La Monja Alferez), Catalina de Erauso (1582—1650). This
final case study brings us full circle to Lima, Madrid, and Rome in the 1620—1630s,
the very same decades that Rosa’s case for canonization was halted as her circle of
followers was examined by the Inquisition. Catalina deliberately rejected the religious
life: she escaped the convent, dressed as a man, and became a soldier and even a
murderer. Yet when her true identity was discovered by a bishop, she somehow
avoided both religious and civil censure. Catalina’s petitions to the Crown and pope,
the autobiographical vida attributed to her, and several posthumous accounts serve
as the sources for studying her seemingly paradoxical case. Most likely, moving from
 Introduction l9

her birthplace in urban Spain to the far reaches of the Spanish American frontier
allowed Catalina to reject the role as a model nun. In the frontier, “civilized” rules
were often ignored. But how was it that she could petition for a reward for her mili¬
tary valor and a license to remain dressed as a man upon her return to the centers of
European secular and sacred power? Catalina’s success at these levels probably was
due in large part to her skill in playing off the different expectations for men and
women. The autobiographical account attributed to her combines a portrait (albeit
brief) of the highly prized virginal woman with that of the valiant soldier. More¬
over, as in Ursula’s account, Catalina weaves into this blurred identity the negative
example of a rogue. In so doing, she creates a hybrid first-person narrative, drawing
on the conventions and ideology of the confessional vida, the soldier’s story, and the
picaresque narrative to create a new identity of a woman living as a man. Not sur¬
4

prisingly, no official church hagiography was written about Catalina. But other pe¬
riod genres—the broadside, the comedia, and a Jesuit history of Chile—retell the
extraordinary life story of the “Monja Alferez.” In these rewritings we see society’s
thirst for titillating stories balanced against the impulse to reject deviation. Each text
&uT K&tO

fictionalizes the life story to make it fit better with societal codes for behavior.
Catalina’s life underscores how the analysis of period life writings needs to take into
account the role of gender, genre, geography, and chronology.
\The life stories of these six colonial women encourage us to reconsider our notion
that women in colonial times were forced to choose the role of obedient'wife or perfect
nun . Although many no doubt followed these traditional models, others found al-
ternate paths. Men and women worked together to construct a new society—though
in distinct gender roles—and were important collaborators in the colonization pro¬
cess. In the chapters that follow, the voices of these women can be heard. Also evi¬
dent is the esteem in which they were held by their own society. The complex interplay
between church practices of confession, canonization, and Inquisition, and individuals’
lives and narratives becomes apparent. These life writings by and about religious
women in colonial Spanish America reveal a dynamic, multivalent process that had
strong implications for individual and societal identity.
I
Potential faints
'V
I

Redeemer of America
Rosa de Lima (lj86—l6lyf)—The Dynamics

of Identity and Canonization

Here is a Rose, new flower of a new world, that from the Pacific Ocean of the
Indies exudes peace, springtime, and joy. Could it be that it exudes sanctity as well?
—Leonard Hansen, “Dedicatoria,” Vida admirable de Santa Rosa

O n April 29, 1671, bells rang throughout Lima, Peru, to announce the arrival of
the papal bull from Clement X that proclaimed America’s first saint, Rosa de
Santa Marla. A criolla woman who was born less than a century after Columbus’s
voyages to America, Rosa was elevated to the highest ranks of the Roman Catholic
Church. A contemporary Dominican chronicler, Juan de Melendez, describes the
celebration that followed in Lima.1 Religious brotherhoods dedicated to Rosa dis¬
played their floats, churches brimmed over with flowers and candles for the event,
and Limenos of all classes and races poured into the streets to follow the procession.
Even the highest ranking state officials, the viceroy and vicereine, attended the Mass
in Rosa’s honor and received the official Roman hagiography and portrait of the
saint. Mele'ndez goes on to report that when a miraculous voice spoke to the assembled
crowd, witnesses interpreted the event as yet another sign that Lima had indeed re¬
ceived God’s favor.
Rosa de Santa Marla (1586—1617) had been a popular figure for Limenos for
over half a century, with mass veneration beginning almost at the moment of the
mystic’s death at the age of thirty-one. Throngs of people fought to catch a glimpse
of Rosa in her open casket at the Church of Santo Domingo, where this lay holy
woman associated with the Dominican order had so often been seen in the past,
praying for Lima’s inhabitants. Chronicles of the period record that the viceroy sum¬
moned the civil guard to control crowds that were clipping pieces of her clothing to
keep as holy relics.2 Soon Limenos were adorning their houses with portraits of Rosa
in order to honor her and to invoke her protection. They also began to form reli¬
gious brotherhoods and to found the Dominican Convent of Santa Catalina, whose
establishment Rosa had prophesied.3
Ecclesiastical officials in Lima responded immediately to this popular devotion
by taking testimony from witnesses as to Rosa’s life and miracles. This first local

23
24 POTENTIAL SAINTS

"diocesan process” (proceso arzobispal) aimed at documenting Rosa s saintly qualities

for canonization took two years to complete fi6i7—i6iq\ By 162s, however, the atti-_
tude of the church seems to have changed: the Inquisition in Lima had confiscated..
her writings, and some ol her lay followers were prosecuted (“processed’ ) by this
same office. These actions reflect growing concern about the rise in local lay reli¬
gious movements. In the meantime, Rosa’s cause had crossed the Atlantic: in 1624
the king of Spain supported her case, and in 1630 Rome initiated a second official
“apostolic process” (proceso apostolico) to gather further testimony about her life. But
her cause came to a halt once again when Pope Urban VIII’s new requirements for
sanctity tabled the discussion for nearly twenty years. By the middle of the seven¬
teenth century, a dramatic exception to the new rules allowed the case to be resumed
against the backdrop of a series of hagiographic biographies whose intent was to
promote the Peruvian woman. Her case now moved quickly, and Rosa was canon¬
ized in exceptionally rapid order (1656—1671). Soon, Catholics throughout the Span¬
ish empire invoked the saint’s protection, and young girls emulated Rosa’s life of
prayer and penance, as depicted in sacred biographies.
Until recently, critics never questioned why a young woman noted for her ex¬
treme penitential practices became an American and a European heroine, exalted
equally by king and pope, Spaniards and Limenos, Dominican clergy and young girls.
The more than four hundred works published about her before the twentieth cen¬
tury simply recount the hagiographic elements of Rosa’s life that had been estab¬
lished in the seventeenth century. But that uniformity has been shaken since then,
with the publication of primary texts that cast Rosa’s life in a new light. Domingo
Angulo published several of Rosa’s letters (1917), Bruno Cayetano and Luis Millones
published significant portions of the canonization testimony (1992, 1993), and Luis
Getino rediscovered and published Rosa’s iconolexic collages about her spiritual life
(1937). Significantly, Getino argues that Rosa’s intellectual ingenuity matched that
of Saint Teresa.4 More recently, with the emergence of new cultural histories and
the study of mentalites, critics have begun to examine the broader contexts of Rosa’s
life: the role of the Counter-Reformation, the extirpation of idolatrous practices in
Peru, and the development of a criollo identity. Scholars such as Luis Galve, Frank
Graziano, Teodoro Martinez Hampe, Fernando Iwasaki, Luis Millones, and Ramon
Mujica Pinilla pose the question of why Rosa de Lima was America’s first saint.
Although their arguments differ, all agree that she became a valuable symbol of identity
for Lima during a time of dramatic changes, in both the city and the Catholic Church.5
A recent study of the politics, dogma, and iconography involved suggests that Rosa
was in the right place at the right time and that her image could be molded to fit the
changing the needs of the faithful.6
Building on the work by Galve, Iwasaki, and Mujica Pinilla, in particular, I pro¬
pose to reformulate the question of why Rosa was the first New World saint and
pose some additional questions: What role was played by the changing church stan¬
dards for sainthood? Why did some clerics promote hagiographies about Rosa’s life,
while others limited access to the spiritual writings and public works of Rosa and
her friends? What was omitted in the process of representing Rosa as an official saint?
Responding to these questions may further our understanding of the process of
 Rosa de Lima 25

defining official sanctity, which affected individual spiritual practices and popular
culture; it may also shed light on attempts to control lay spirituality and to regulate
the role of women within the church. Before these questions can be addressed di¬
rectly, a brief biographical account is in order.

The Holy Portrait of America’s Rosa

By the time of Rosa’s birth in 1586, Lima, named by conquistadors as the City of the
Kings and founded by Francisco Pizarro fewer than fifty years earlier, was a place of
extreme contrasts and rapid growth. Innovations in silver production and the estab¬
lishment of Spanish institutions had created a densely populated and racially mixed
city of both splendor and squalor; moreover, Lima was vulnerable to the dangers of
earthquakes and pirates, as well as the deep political and religious rifts that ran through
the entire viceroyalty of Peru. Struggles over Indian labor, native rebellions, civil wars,
factions within religious orders, and unrest due to the extirpation movement of na¬
tive religions in the Andes characterized the civil and ecclesiastical politics of the
period. The opulence of city architecture and the wealth of the criollo elite stood in
stark contrast to the increasing numbers of American-born vagabonds, displaced
indigenous peoples, and African slaves.7
In this cauldron of social and economic unrest, religious fervor and asceticism
flourished. With the arrival of the new archbishop Tonbio de Mogrovejo in 1581,
the Peruvian church took new initiatives, setting up a printing press to publish cat¬
echisms and devotional works and establishing a council, the Concilio Limense (1582),
to centralize the process of evangelization. Men and women flocked to religious
houses, giving their lives to the church. By 1614, at least 10 percent of the estimated
25,454 inhabitants were members of religious orders.8 A significant number of these
men and women would subsequently receive special recognition from the church.
Besides Rosa, three Limenos from the early seventeenth century would later be can¬
onized by Rome, not to mention a substantial list of aspirants whose cases were to
receive serious consideration.9
In this city that was filling with both riches and ascetic saints, Rosa lived, died,
and was later proclaimed a saint. Most of the information about her life comes from
the two canonization processes (in 1617—1619 and 1630—1632) and hagiographic sto¬
ries of her heroic Christian behavior.10 Briefly, Rosa was born Isabel Flores de Oliva
to Marfa de Oliva and Don Gaspar de Flores, one of eleven children. Divine favor
reportedly blessed the infant when a servant saw the baby’s face transformed into a
rose, a symbol of a European flower transplanted to the New World. From that day
forward, the child was called Rosa. At age five, the girl heard the life story of the
popular Italian saint, Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), and soon she began to imitate
her ascetic practices. One source states that Rosa soon memorized the complete life
story of Catherine.11 Like the Italian holy woman, Rosa built a hut in her backyard
for prayer and penitential practices.
Rosa’s parents were criollos of modest means. Although her father had received
a post as an arms-maker (arcabuquero) for the king, at times he worked at several modest
occupations, including that of dyer. Rosa’s mother and sisters supplemented the
26 POTENTIAL SAINTS

family’s income by sewing and running a home school for girls learning needlework.
During her adolescent years, Rosa moved to the Andean mountain town of Quives,
where her father worked for a period as overseer of an obraje (textile factory employ¬
ing conscripted Indian labor).12 Biographers say little about these years, but they do
mention Rosa’s compassion for indigenous laborers and her confirmation by the
bishop and future saint, Toribio de Mogrovejo.
By the time of her return to Lima, Rosa, like her exemplar Catherine of Siena, had
received the spiritual gift of mystic marriage to Christ. She then chose a lifestyle that
was appropriate to her spirituality, that of a lay holy woman, and became known only
by her religious name of Rosa de Santa Marla. Not surprisingly, this choice set her in
conflict with both her mother (who wanted her to marry) and with her confessor (who
wanted her to enter a convent). Biographers report that Rosa undermined her mother’s
efforts to present suitors for marriage by putting hot chili peppers in her eyes, and her
confessor’s efforts to make her a nun by freezing in place when she was on her way to
the Convent of Santa Clara.13 Later, Rosa became a tertiary—first informally associ¬
ated with the Franciscan order (ca. 1603—1607)—and then the Dominican order (ca.
1607), like her model Catherine. She took simple religious vows, which required chas¬
tity, poverty, and obedience, but did not require perpetual enclosure.
During this time Rosa followed a rigorous schedule of work, prayer, and pen¬
ance. The proceedings for her canonization state that she generally worked ten hours
a day, prayed twelve hours, and slept two.14 Much of her workday consisted of sew¬
ing for her mother. To keep herself awake at night and pray, she was given to hang¬
ing herself by her hair. Other severe penances included wearing a crown of thorns
(later, of metal) and sleeping on a bed that was designed to cause suffering. Her first
biographer, Pedro Loayza, elaborates:

From a tender age she slept on beds made for penitents. The first one that
she had was made of three wide planks, one wider than the others, and the
one that served as the headboard had a hole into which she inserted her
head; in this way was her body broken in or yoked like a burro, and when
she woke up, she would place these planks under the bed. This saintly woman
also made another bed out of seven sticks, latticed in the form of a grill,
out of some cattle horns, which she placed on a board, and between the
joints she placed many sharp ceramic shards, and she would lay down on
them, not in order to sleep but, rather, to suffer. The board was set so that
the shards stayed in place and would not fall to the floor, and the sticks, so
that they would not lean against her body. She slept on this bed for fifteen
or sixteen years.15

Rosa’s most famous biographer, Leonard Hansen, depicts her self-mortification

in yet more detail. She walked barefoot in the garden with a heavy cross on her shoul¬
ders, suffered painful illnesses, and whipped herself as atonement for the sins of the
world:

Every night she whipped her back bloody so hard and cruelly that blood
splattered the walls, the floor and her clothing, for the innocent maiden
 Rosa de Lima 27

believed that she deserved all these punishments for her sins. In addition to
these, filled with compassion in times of public calamities, she endeavored
to imitate her Teacher [Catherine of Siena] with acts of penitence, placat¬
ing the wrath of God and mitigating His justice, for which she would wound
her body, sometimes for the troubles afflicting the entire Holy Mother
Church, other times for the anguish and dangers suffered by her homeland,
mercilessly making of herself a bloody sacrifice, in order thereby to gain
the mercy of Heaven and to heal the common wounds with wounds of her
own.16

Rosa’s fasts were equally rigorous. Again like Catherine of Siena, she tried to
subsist by eating nothing but the Communion host, although she added a New World
element to the regimen: Indian servants helped with her special diets and mortifica¬
tions. The belief was that fasting and penances helped to purify the person and re¬
deem humankind.
Rosa’s spiritual practice included active prayer for souls and for the city of Lima.
Biographers report she was graced with divine gifts such as intercessional powers,
mystical union with Christ, and prophecy. According to Counter-Reformation doc¬
trine and popular belief, such powers were the physical manifestation and outgrowth
of Rosa’s chosen status before God. She spent hours in solitary prayer beseeching
God’s intervention to cure a variety of community ills that ranged from natural di¬
sasters to suffering souls in purgatory. As the intermediary for miracles, Rosa tamed
both earthquakes and disease-carrying mosquitoes as God responded to her appeals
to save her native city from destruction.
By 1613, Rosa took up residence with a neighboring family, the Gonzalo de la
Mazas, whose home was a haven for pious local lay people. There Rosa developed
her spiritual gifts as she advised Jesuits and Dominican friars, visited prominent
women, established a circle of religious followers, and taught her patron’s two daugh¬
ters. She also formed prayer groups when the city was in danger. Hagiographers credit
her group’s intercessory powers with saving Lima in 1615 from the Dutch Protestant
pirate Janis van Speilberg. Although she was active in the local community, as a woman
Rosa was prohibited from carrying her evangelism beyond the city to the Andean
foothills where native Americans lived. As one confessor noted, Rosa lamented these
limitations: “ ‘Oh, I wish I were a man, just so I could participate in the conversion
of souls,’ and to this end she exhorted all the preachers she knew to convert many
souls and to go out and make all the idolaters of this land surrender to God. And she
urged that they make this the primary goal of their studies.”17 A visible yet at times
reclusive figure within Lima, Rosa became popularly known as one of its protectors
during her own lifetime.
Even though Rosa was recognized for her spiritual gifts and compassion, she
was nonetheless scrutinized by the Inquisition. In 1614, Rosa was examined infor¬
mally by several members of the Inquisition, but the consensus was that Rosa was
following an orthodox path. Within three years of her examination and after years
of extreme fasts and penances, Rosa was dead. In his testimony, Gonzalo de la Maza
reports: “The health and constitution of the said blessed Rosa was by then so wasted
POTENTIAL SAINTS J_: v' 0 /ij)
,-itA^S
by so many ailments and pains that she could not produce anything of note at her
labors nor help her parents in the way that she had done during the course of her
Jife.”18 Upon her death, a number of her closest followers reportedly experienced
flights of spirit (arrobamientos), several of which are transcribed in the canonization
processes as a sure sign of Rosa’s holiness.19 In the years following her death, Catho¬
lics in places as far away as Antwerp and Sicily were interviewed as witnesses to Rosa’s
miraculous intercessions.20
The first stage in Rosa’s canonization process began immediately upon her death
and was initiated by at least three sections of Limeno society: city officials, the Arch¬
bishop of Lima, and the Dominican order.21 For two years, from 1617 to 1619, an offi¬
cial council took testimony from witnesses close to Rosa, including some seventy-five
family members, members of her religious circle, and various clergymen, mostly Do¬
minican friars and Jesuits.22 More than half the witnesses were male religious. Included
in this canonization file is a short biography written by her Dominican confessor, Pedro
de Loayza.23 During these years, popular veneration of Rosa grew so rapidly that the
Dominicans decided to exhume Rosa’s body and move her tomb to a more visible place
in the Church of Santo Domingo (1619). A second Dominican confessor, Luis de Bilbao,
delivered a panegyric sermon to celebrate the occasion.
Given this evidence of Rosa’s spiritual stature among the laity and the Domini¬
cans, the suspension of her cult in Lima five years later comes as a surprise. A reason
for the suspension may rest with the Dominicans themselves, who were experiencing
a schism in their order, occasioned in part by a dispute over the choice of a candi¬
date to promote as a Dominican saint.24 Not only was the cult suspended, but the
censor of the Inquisition, Luis de Bilbao—one of Rosa’s own confessors—demanded
(in compliance with the Inquisitor General’s orders in 1622) that Rosa’s works and
personal effects be turned over to his office.25 The Inquisition also examined many
of Rosa’s followers for evidence of the heretical practice of illuminism (alumbradismo).26
Her lay spiritual guide, Juan del Castillo, and her close companion, Marla Luisa
Melgarejo, had their writings censured, and a handful of lay holy women were pub¬
licly processed by the Inquisition. Ironically, while Limenos were debating the spiri¬
tual practices of Rosa and her group, officials in Spain began to promote her case.
King Philip IV sent the 1617 Proceso to the Council of the Indies, which then for¬
warded it to the Spanish ambassador in Rome in 1624. The king was so enthusiastic
about Rosa s sanctity that he soon named her patron of his armed forces, even though
she was not yet a saint.
Although the case stagnated for several years, by 1630 the Holy See in Rome
had opened an official inquiry into canonization 27 Now out of the hands of Limenos,
local Dominicans, and the Crown, the case was solely under the jurisdiction of the
highest ecclesiastical office. In this Proceso apostolico, officials interviewed a larger and
broader cross-section of society: of the 147 witnesses about half were women, and
many were ordinary citizens. Spurred perhaps by the immense popular devotion to
Rosa, the church increasingly shifted its focus from associating Rosa with the Do¬
minican order to making her a symbol for the city of Lima. The complete apostolic
document for Rosa s canonization was presented to the Vatican’s Sacred Congrega¬
tion of Holy Rites in 1634.
 Rosa de Lima

But Rosa's case came to another halt because of Pope Urban VIII’s reforms.
Responding to Protestant attacks on Catholic veneration of saints, the pope added
new rules to the Council of Trent’s stated criteria for sanctity. The new rules en¬
couraged more historical documentation about a candidate’s life and required that
fifty years elapse between the death of a candidate and consideration of the individual’s
case for sanctity. Rosa had died only seventeen years earlier.
In 1656, a new pope, Alexander VII, made an exception to the fifty-year rule,
and heavy lobbying by the Dominicans in Rome and the Spanish Crown helped to
reactivate Rosa’s candidacy. A rapid succession of events ensued. A year later, King
Philip IV sent his ambassador to Rome, again to promote the case. The influential
English Dominican, Leonard Hansen, was asked in 1664 to write a biography of Rosa.
His four-hundred-page Latin text, Vita Mirabilis Mors Pretiosa Venerabilis Sororis Rosa de
S. Maria, became the most successful hagiography of her life. Written by someone
who never knew her, the account, which drew on the two procesos, nonetheless offers
a compelling portrait of Rosa as the Catherine of Siena of the New World. Although
initially written for a Roman audience, the biography was quickly translated into
several languages and widely disseminated, hence becoming a valuable tool for pro¬
moting Rosa’s cause.28 In spite of several competing biographies, Hansen’s work
became the classic life of Rosa over the course of the next few centuries. In addition
to the commission of Leonard’s hagiography, the Dominican Gonzalez de Acuna
was sent to Rome to oversee Rosa’s case (1661), and the queen of Spam, Mariana of
Austria, sent a petition to Rome on Rosa’s behalf (1665). Reports of local miracles
and celebrations in Lima and miraculous apparitions of Rosa in Europe further pres¬
sured Rome. In 1668 Rosa de Santa Marfa was beatified; in 1669 Pope Clement IX
declared Rosa patron of Lima and Peru; in 1670 Pope Clement X extended this title
to patron of America and the Philippines; and in 1671 Rosa became a saint.
During the next century, dozens of hagiographic representations of Rosa emerged
in paintings and texts.29 Popular images of the samt include Rosa holding the city of
Lima in her hand; appearing as a double for the beloved Virgen del Rosario; carry¬
ing an anchor to symbolize her faith; and practicing severe mortification.30 (See fig¬
ures 1.1 and 1.2.) Rosa became a symbol for a Catholic America and a reason for
celebration. As part of the festivities held in Lima upon Rosa’s canonization, for
example, a poetry contest (certamen) was held.31 More traditional religious works, such
as prayerbooks, novenas, and sermons based on the saint's life and prayers, also were
published extensively in Lima and Mexico. In increasingly grandiloquent, symbolic
language, criollos and Spaniards alike turned Rosa into a religious and political icon.
For the latter, she often represented a new type of conquistador, while for the former,
the saint proved America’s parity with the Old World.32 For both", Rosa was a power-
fuTsymbol of America’s triumphant Roman Catholic Christianity.
The Spanish Count Oviedo y Herrera, previously posted to Peru, wrote a lengthy
epiTpoem in 1711," portraying the saint as being integral to the" conquest and evange¬
lization of America."33 in a license to publish a sermon preached to celebrate Rosa's ’
beatification, the censor for the Inquisition represents Rosa as converting the American
“jungle”: her “virtuous fragrances . . . have converted into a paradise of holy delights
the previously barbarous jungle of our South America.”34 Whereas Rosa’s model,
Figure i . i “Los pueblos rinden culto a la Bienaventurada Rosa of Santa Marfa” by
Lazaro Baldi, 1668, in the Iglesia Santa Marfa Sopra Minerva, Rome (Courtesy of Ramon
Mujica Pinilla)
 Rosa de Lima 3i

Figure 1.2 “Penetencias para veneer el sueno” by Laureano Davila, eighteenth century,
in the Monasterio de Santa Rosa, Santiago de Chile (Courtesy of Ramon Mujica Pinilla)

Catherine of Siena, had labored among Christians to reform and further Dominican
causes, Rosa, her devotees insisted, had sought to convert pagans to Christianity.
Through her, Rome itself was to be brought to an acceptance of America’s essential
role in the history of the Universal Catholic Church. Rosa became the symbol for a
New World that had been saved—evidence that the idolatrous practices of natives
had been conquered and Catholicism firmly implanted.(The Dominican chronicler
Juan Melendez once again captures the common sentiment as he calls her “our he¬
roic criolla,” the “redeemer” of the New World, in a world in which there are “two
spheres,” Lima and Rome.35

Hagiography and Rescripting a Life Story

An examination of the canonization process and hagiographies suggests that ideol¬

ogy and practice with regard to sainthood changed in the Counter-Reformation
Catholic Church of the seventeenth century. The early church’s original definition
32 POTENTIAL SAINTS

of saint as any holy person became more complex as church bureaucracy and cen¬
tralization grew.36 By Rosa’s time, Rome orchestrated all canonization processes in
its struggle to balance popular veneration of local holy people with the new require¬
ments for official recognition of a saint. As a result, there was a long hiatus from
1629 to 1658 when no new saints were added to Catholic altars.37 Besides demon-
strating doctrinal purity and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, a
Counter-Reformation saint had to demonstrate heroic virtue in the faithful imita-
tion of Christ through asceticism, contemplation, and active service to Christianity.
As the renunciation of worldly passions and possessions, asceticism strengthened the
individual in stamping out vices and following Christ in suffering for the sins of others.
Contemplation and prayer also drew a person closer to God, by developing the art
of spiritual dialogue and the readiness to receive divine messages. A saint might then
witness divine grace working through her in the form of such miracles as healings,
prophecies, and intercessions, as well as corporeal, imaginary, and intellectual visions.38
Unlike samts from earlier periods, however, Counter-Reformation saints needed only
a few miracles to prove their sanctity, while proof of heroic virtue carried far more
weight. Such heroic lifestyles had to reflect post-Tridentine guidelines that advo-
cated subordination to the guidance of ecclesiastical hierarchy and observance of the
sacraments—in particular, confession and communion.
These official requirements for sainthood influenced the procesos and the hagiog¬
raphies about Rosa’s life. All texts accentuate Rosa’s ascetic, prayerful, and heroic
life. The hagiographies also seek to inspire emulation in readers. The standard ques¬
tions asked of most witnesses in the processes of 1617—1619 and 1630—1632 elicited
critical biographical information, as well as evidence of Rosa’s moral qualities and
the special merits she received through divine action. A second set of questions from
the 1630s documented miraculous intercessions.39 Closely following the structure and
information of the two procesos, hagiographies delineate the life of Rosa according to
ideals of heroic virtue and God’s grace; individual aspects of her life story are far less
important than proving her conformity within the community of saints. Following
a two-part organization, the hagiographies generally recount the chronological life
and death of the subject, and then examine the virtues. (A variation was to narrate
the life, the virtues, and then the death of the subject.) The life narrative sets forth
examples of moral behavior, prayer and penance, observance of the sacraments and
dogma, and evidence of God’s hand working directly in the subject’s life. Leonard
Hansen s popular hagiography of Rosa clearly demonstrates his awareness of these
guidelines for the representation of sanctity: the preliminary pages explain his his¬
torical method and emphasize his close observation of the guidelines established by
the Congregation of Holy Rites: “This history was not taken from apocryphal ac¬
counts lacking weight and authority, but rather from the proceedings that by order
of the Holy See were held in Lima, in order to list her m the catalogue of the saints.”40
Serving as proof of sanctity (before 1671) and exemplary models for the faithful,
hagiographical narratives of Rosa were the church’s public representation of a holy
life according to post-Tridentine rules.
The question arises, however, as to whether material was omitted in the process
of establishing Rosa’s conformity with the criteria for sanctity. Probably there were
 Rosa de Lima 33

not-so-holy elements in Rosa’s life—or at least, elements that the church did not
want to promote publicly. Two topics recur in the procesos and hagiographies that are
polemical yet carefully controlled for meaning: the fact that Rosa had been ques¬
tioned informally by several members of Lima’s Inquisition and the fact that she wrote
about her spiritual life. Although Hansen presents the interrogation as proof of her
orthodoxy and her poetry and prayers as spontaneous compositions for God,41 the
historical record of events between 1622 and 1625 indicates that Rosa’s group threat-
j ened goals the church had set in Lima and that she may have been an accomplished
mystic writer. Like Teresa of Avila, Luis de Leon, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of
Loyola in sixteenth-century Spain, Rosa appears to have been the subject of Inquisi¬
torial scrutiny, and her spiritual writings and public teachings were censored because
the orthodoxy of her beliefs and behavior were suspect. At the time, the political
and ecclesiastical climate in Spain was such that this censorship was generally over¬
turned, and subsequent hagiographies silenced or reinterpreted the Inquisitorial in¬
terventions in the lives of saints. In Rosa’s case, her 1614 examination by the Inquisition
ultimately served to help build a saintly portrait of her.
The first proceso records the 1614 examination of Rosa as a dialogue among the
lay doctor employed by the Holy Office in Lima, Juan del Castillo, her confessor,
the Inquisitor Fray Juan de Lorenzana, and Rosa, with her mother observing the
encounter.42 When Castillo asked Rosa about her “interior impulses,” including her
prayers, visions, and penances, she responded by speaking of her spiritual practice
and supernatural encounters with the divine. He continued the exploration of her
spirit by asking if she had experienced authentic mystic union with the divine (oration
de union), characterized by the highest level of visionary activity (“intellectual visions”),
or whether she had brought these supernatural occurrences on herself, perhaps by
fasting too severely. More important, Castillo and Lorenzana wanted to differenti¬
ate her spiritual practices from those of the alumbrados and thus define them as or¬
thodox. Castillo based his inquiry on Teresa’s mysticism, which he had studied for
his own book of commentaries on the Spanish saint’s writings. The verdict was that
Rosa was privy to the highest form of religious experience, thus making her a bonafide
mystic.43
In quoting passages from this dialogue with the inquisitors, most biographers
describe the process as the rustic talking to learned men about divine mysteries. Hansen
places the examination in the context of the popular dialogue genre—which focused
on drawing out an essential truth—and presents the place, interlocutors, and theme
of the dialogue. He argues that the examination provided proof of her sanctity,44
because Castillo was a well-known authority on mysticism and Lorenzana—in his
triple role as prior of a Dominican monastery, university professor, and censor for
the Inquisition—was an expert on discerning people’s spirits. The series of ques¬
tions posed to Rosa moved quickly from an examination about suspect spiritual
activity to using her as a springboard to discuss the authentic mystic path. The dia¬
logic process ultimately uncovers a fundamental truth and serves as a vehicle to fur¬
ther church doctrine. Rosa becomes the unlettered authority about divine mysteries:
“All were astonished by the responses of a simple, unlettered girl, when asked about
the secret mystery of the Holy Trinity . . . and the fact that so many matters hidden
34 POTENTIAL SAINTS

from wise and prudent men, are revealed and made manifest to the humble, to chil¬
dren, and to the unlettered. ... It seemed to Lorenzana that he was seeing not a
woman, but rather a mature professor of one branch or another of theology.”45 They
all concluded “[that] the spirit of God worked through her, that she was filled with
the gift of wisdom, that she was led by infused wisdom from Heaven.”46 Rosa had
intuitive knowledge of God.
What hagiographers like Hansen tended to ignore is that within ten years of this
inquiry this same office severely undermined access to Rosa’s own words and those of
her followers. Biographers and witnesses rarely mention the Holy Office’s second in-
tervention in the 1620s when it confiscated Rosa's works and began a systematic silenc-
ing of lay religious people close to her. This may appear to be a contradictory church
response, but it served the single purpose of controlling direct public access to power¬
ful lay people’s spiritual works. Ironically, the man who was instrumental in establish¬
ing Rosa’s orthodoxy m the 1614 examination, and who had been a key witness in the
first proceso, was now censored by the Inquisition on two counts. As Mujica Pmilla has
shown, Juan de Castillo’s commentaries on the mystic process, which were based pri¬
marily on Teresa’s Vida and Interior Castle, were proclaimed in 1624 to be “heterodox”
because he “corrected” Teresa.47 More significantly, he was accused of overstepping
his bounds as a lay person (“for he is a mere lay person and not a theologian”) and of
inciting pious lay women (beatasj to have visions: “By confusing them he controls all
their spiritual affairs, by which means he seeks to deceive many simple little women
[and] seeing how for others this is a hot commodity he has written a book of his own
revelations and four notebooks about the synopsis and revelations of Mother Teresa.”48
Castillo himself received a light sentence, but his works fared less well: they were re¬
moved from circulation.49 Notably, when Hansen wrote his biography forty years later,
he did not mention Castillo’s encounter with the Inquisition. Hansen presents the doctor
as one of the most learned men m Lima, who, despite his lay status, was considered an
expert on mystical theology; he argues that Castillo’s knowledge was not just a matter
of “speculative discourses,” but was based rather on his own spiritual experiences and
treatises ("tratados”). Because Castillo had officially authorized Rosa’s mystical voca¬
tion, it was important to portray him as an authority on the topic and emphasize that
his “life was a mirror of virtue.”50
The Inquisition also questioned Rosa’s close companion, Marla Luisa Melgarejo,
who had been a key witness for promoting Rosa’s sanctity in the 1617 proceso. In 1623,
Inquisitors were particularly concerned about Marla Luisa’s prolific spiritual jour¬
nals (by some counts there were at least fifty-nine). The notebooks had begun to
circulate in manuscript, and some clergymen feared they would be misinterpreted as
alumbradismo. Although Marla Luisa’s confessor had already censored the notebooks
before turning them over to the Holy Office, they were later confiscated and may
have been burned.51 Nonetheless, Maria Luisa was called on as a witness again for
the 1630 proceso, and upon her death several decades later she became the subject of
hagiography herself.52 The most public messages about curbing Rosa’s influence in¬
cluded the actions taken against some beatas who claimed to follow Rosa’s example;
they were processed by the Inquisition and convicted as alumbradas in the auto-da-fe'
that took place in Lima’s Plaza Mayor in 1625.53
 Rosa de Lima 35

During these same years, the Inquisition confiscated Rosa’s own writings, in¬
cluding letters, poetry, and spiritual notebooks.54 In one of her few extant holographs,
the future saint mentions that she had written spiritual texts (“which on various
occasions I have written for the glory of God”; “the divine mercies that I have writ¬
ten in this way in the notebooks”).55 Several sources state more specifically that Rosa
had written at least several notebooks (cuademos), one containing religious poetry and
another her spiritual autobiography.56 In the struggle to define sanctity and heresy,
a 1624 edict of the Inquisition required that these documents be turned over to the
Holy Office for scrutiny.57 A document from the Lima office sent to Madrid regis¬
ters her “book manuscript” as receiving a severe “going-over” (ra/ifiranon).58 New
research at the Convent of Santa Rosa in Lima may uncover some of these lost texts.59
Until such time, however, two autograph documents are significant. One of Rosa’s
letters, published for the first time in 1917, reveals that she was a capable organizer
and worked hard to found a convent in spite of resistance from the Dominican order.
She mentions marshaling support from Juan del Castillo, collecting funds, and ar¬
ranging for a statue of the patron saint to be brought from Seville, and she notes
that four women were already wearing Dominican nuns’ habits.60 Yet more reveal¬
ing is the collage housed at the Dominican Monasterio de Santa Rosa and published
for the first time in the 1930s: it suggests that hagiographic representations of Rosa
focused on her penitential practices and downplayed her knowledge of the mystical
life and texts.61
From the first, Hansen’s biography downplays the extent of Rosa’s learning. In
a chapter dealing with her upbringing, he mentions “education” in the very title,62
but the narrative only develops Rosa’s physical suffering from an early age: she pa¬
tiently endured deafening earaches, illnesses, and cuts. A handful of chapters later
we find out that Rosa did know how to read, but Hansen mentions it strictly in the
context of Rosa learning how to imitate the lives of Catherine of Siena and the fa¬
mous Mexican hermit and ascetic, Gregorio Lopez. He privileges her mortification
over her learning: “It is amazing that a body so emaciated and consumed by so many
fasts had enough room to receive lashes, and enough blood to flow from these.
Nevertheless, so great was the desire and care that Rosa had in punishing her body
that it was necessary that her confessors restrain her in this.”63 When talking about
the prayers and songs Rosa composed, Hansen presents them only briefly and as
spontaneous compositions inspired by God.
Other biographers and witnesses also describe Rosa’s penitential practices and
record Rosa’s spontaneous composition of rather simple religious songs and prayers.
Confessors and family members note Rosa’s habit of singing devotional couplets and
accompanying herself on guitar:

Leave me, little bird

flee the agile singer,
but you are always with me
my sweet Redeemer:
Gentle nightingale,
let us praise the Lord;
 POTENTIAL SAINTS

you extol your Creator,

I sing to my Savior.64

She also made word plays on her names (Flores y Oliva, flowers and olive trees):
\
Oh, Jesus of my soul!
How wonderfully you appear
among the flowers and the roses
and the olive groves of green.65

The prayers attributed to Rosa mention divine love, gratitude, and God’s magnifi¬
cence. Based on the rosary, her “Angelic Exercise,” for example, praises the Holy
Trinity.66 Some of these devotional prayers were edited land perhaps significantly
changed) by church officials and then published as official texts.
HRcRasmo r eelab o r a t e work, the two-part iconolexic collage, “The Mercies” (Las
mercedes) and “The Mystical Stairway” (La escala misticad), however, was not published
or mentioned in colonial texts. Through a series of cutout hearts pierced by arrows,
crosses, and lances, each surrounded by a written motto, the collage expresses Rosa’s
understanding of the mystic’s journey of purgation, illumination, and union with the
divine. Based on the early modern use of emblems to unite words with images to
convey concepts, Rosa’s work echoes ideas developed by Teresa and John of the Cross.
The Mercedes consists of three hearts placed in a column to represent the stages to
mystic union with God: the heart wounded by love for God, the heart that carries
the cross and Jesus, and the heart in ecstatic flight to God and living in him. Mottos
accompany each heart, and a lengthier written explanation frames the lower part of
the page. (See figure 1.3.) The Escala mistica continues the representation of the heart’s
journey to God. The center of the page has a cutout of a symbol of the fifteen “Lev¬
els of Divine Love,” conceptualized as a stairway based, as the image states, on “hu¬
mility” and “perfection.” Thirteen hearts on either side of the steps depict how
continual prayer leads to illumination and union with God. At the bottom of the
page, a note in another hand (perhaps her Dominican confessor’s) explains: “Favors
J\that Our Mother and Holy Patron Saint Rosa de Santa Marfa received, what they
mean is written in her own hand.”67 (See figure 1.3.) Not only does the collage have
an admirable primitive artistry, but also it reveals a significant ingenuity and under-
standmg of mystic theology and the emblematic tradition.
Like T eresa, Rosa opens her text on a paradoxical note: she is a woman writing
under obedience to a confessor but who claims authority for her own mystical expe¬
rience. The collages are part of the confessional process: “[Here is] that which I submit
to Our Father as my only spiritual director, so that he might correct my errors, and
emend that which the present work might lack or my ignorance. Many errors and
faults you will find being explained by my own hand and if you find anything that is
good, it will only be because of the grace of God.”68 Rosa explains further that God,
rather than books, is the source of her mystic process: “I confess in all truth in the
presence of God that all the mercies which I have recorded in this way in notebooks
as engraved and painted on these two pieces of paper I have neither seen nor read
about in any book, they are only worked through this sinner by the powerful hand
 Rosa de Lima 37

of the Lord in whose book I read what is Eternal Wisdom.”69 This posture of holy
ignorance and obedience to church superiors was essential for any woman mystic
who sought to justify writing about her spiritual path. She further inscribed the work
into the confessional process by saying that, after making a general confession with
the Dominicans (ca. 1608), she composed the text:

Out of divine mercy I received these three graces before a great tribulation
that I suffered in the general confession [that I made] by order of that
confessor, and it gave me so much that I deserved after having made the
general confession and having suffered nearly two years of severe pains,
tribulations, desolation, despair, temptations, battles with demons, the lies
of confessors and of ordinary people. Illnesses, pains, fever, and, in short,
all the greatest torments of hell that can be imagined during those final years,
it would be five years since I received graces from the Lord that I have set
down on this half sheet of paper, by the inspiration of my heart, although
unworthy.70

Typical of most autobiographical spiritual writing by religious women in the pe¬

riod, this text is a result of its author enduring a period of suffering and working
closely with a spiritual director. Rosa’s work, although a hybrid artistic text that
included both drawings and writing, is inscribed within Teresian mysticism and the
“rhetoric of femininity.”71
Yet Rosa’s insistence on holy ignorance, confession, and obedience does not mean
that she was literally unschooled. Again, like Teresa, Rosa had worked closely with
many learned men and listened carefully to church sermons and readings. One con¬
fessor testified that Rosa memorized entire sermons after hearing them only twice.72
She studied doctrinal works in the Devotio moderna tradition by the sixteenth-century
Spanish author Fray Luis de Granada, consulted with the learned Juan del Castillo,
and participated in extended dialogues with well-educated Jesuit and Dominican
confessors, several of whom were associated with the founding of Peru’s first uni¬
versity, the University of San Marcos.73
In fact, the fifteen-step “stairway” or “ladder” and the imagery of the heart
participate in long monographic and textual church traditions.74 The idea of a lad¬
der to the divine originated in the story of Jacob (Genesis 28:12). The two women
mystics Rosa most admired, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila, had both used
the heart as the central metaphor for the soul flying to God.75 Iconographic images
frequently depicted Catherine with a cross embedded in a heart and Teresa with an
arrow (dardo) piercing her heart; they symbolized the intimate relationship between
the experience of divine love and the pain of surrender to it. In addition, meditation
guides from the period, such as Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, encouraged the
use of visual imagery in prayer, which, in turn, inspired the production of allegorical
emblem books. Many of these books include images of the human heart.76 By Rosa’s
time, the human heart had become the key symbol for affective piety and mysticism.
Rosa may have borrowed the imagery from her Limeno contemporary, Alvarez de
Paz, who published a work about a fifteen-step process of movement toward God
and who had been one of Castillo’s authorities in determining Rosa’s orthodoxy.77
3§
Figure 1.3 Left: Las merceies, first page; right: La escala mistica,” second page, both by
Santa Rosa de Lima, ca. 1608, in the Monasterio de Santa Rosa, Lima (Courtesy of Ramon
Mujica Pinilla)

39
40 POTENTIAL SAINTS

Or she may have read or heard about Granada’s popular translation in 1562 of the
seventh-century San Juan Climaco’s “Spiritual Ladder” (Escala espiritual) about a thirty-
step spiritual process.
Rosa’s conceptualization of the prayer of union and ascent to God as a mystic
marriage between a bride and bridegroom came directly from church interpretations
over the centuries of the biblical text, The Song of Songs.7s The Mercedes quotes The Song
of Songs in Latin. Because of the prohibition against lay persons reading the Bible,
Rosa’s source again may have been Teresa or John of the Cross. Using the spiritual
analogy of God as a lover wounding his beloved in order to prepare her for union
with him, Rosa’s winged heart moves through the stages of being “wounded by an
arrow of love/’ receiving the nails of Christ’s painful Passion on the cross, being “sick
with love, unto death,” and, yet more deeply wounded by a “a fiery spear” and “arrow
of divine love.” These stages open the way for the purification of the heart, the rec¬
ognition that one must follow the way of the cross (“life is the Cross”) and finally
the “spiritual betrothal” in which the winged heart flies to God in a mystical union
of the soul with the Holy Spirit in divine marriage.79 As promised in the biblical
source, and reiterated by both Teresa and John, this final stage is a sort of drunken¬
ness and loss of self in a moment of ecstasy: “Ecstasy. Intoxication in the wine cellar.
Secrets of divine love. Oh happy union, in the close embrace of God!”80
One of the confessors who later would be instrumental in the Inquisition cases
of the 1620s claimed that Rosa’s understanding of church doctrine was so extensive
that he would classify her as a “consummate theologian,” able to speak the dogma
of the Trinity and Incarnation, among other sacred topics.81 If Rosa was indeed an
accomplished mystic and writer, the question why she has been represented prima¬
rily as a woman who practiced extreme mortification is all the more insistent.
Although the hybrid artistic rendering of the mystic process in the Escala may
have marked the text for marginalization, a more likely cause was that the church
wanted to control the representation of female sanctity and to redirect the growing
lay religiosity that threatened to detract from the power from of the institutional
church. The Council of Trent had mandated the perpetual enclosure of nuns and
encouraged women with strong religious vocations to seek the safety of the convent
yvhere confessors and rules for daily life and spiritual practice monitored their spiri¬
tuality. Although often ineffective m its efforts, the~cKurch wanted demonstrations '
of extraordinary feminine piety to be carefully controlled and reserved for established
institutions. Confessors often ordered their spiritual daughters to write about their
spiritual experiences, which clergy later used as the basis for posthumous male-
authored biographies about religious women. As a result, after Teresa’s time, women’s
words rarely were published directly. In fact, Teresa’s own Vida was in the hands of
the Inquisition for many years before it was released for publication.82
Nancy E. van Deusen and Fernardo Iwasaki argue that popular lay religious move¬
ments in Lima undermined church efforts to set limits on spiritual behavior and lay
authority.83 In fact, it is the setting of limits that differentiated saintly behavior from
heretics. The church recognized the power of Rosa’s life for claiming a Christian iden¬
tity for America, but it also reacted to an implicit threat to post-Tridentine church
 Rosa de Lima 41

efforts to enclose religious women, curb lay people’s access to theological books, and
limit circulation of women s—and particularly pious lay women’s—writings.
Although the church considered women’s spiritual texts to be valuable aids to
confessors, the writings were dangerous to the welfare of both woman and church if
they were made public without the editing (and censorship) of trained church clergy.
Thus, the more widely the news of a holy woman spread, the more control was needed
over access to her works. Rosa’s works caused alarm only after the first proceso was
completed and popular veneration and emulation of her spread throughout Lima.
As her case moved up the hierarchical ladder of the church, her original words were
carefully selected and reinterpreted through hagiography and the process of canoni¬
zation. The events of 1623—1625 were recast. As one witness in 1630 explains, women
were using Rosa’s good name to authorize spiritual paths that the church did not
allow: Until today .. . although there had appeared in the said city certain women
of whom it was said that they dedicated themselves to spiritual matters, it appeared
afterward that they were not on the right path for the service of God because some
were punished and these women conversed with the said Sister Rosa in order to see
if by chance this would authorize their actions and after their sins had been revealed
this discredited somewhat the said Rosa . . . and after the noise died down and the
said women were punished Sister Rosa’s reputation was restored.”84 The portrayal
of Rosa as a writer and a lay woman with a religious vocation was downplayed as
posthumous representations fixed an image of her as the Catherine of Siena of the
New World. Hagiographies omitted mention of Rosa’s learning and emphasized her
spontaneous experience of divine love and knowledge as the outcome of her penance
and prayer and of God’s mercy. The church that promoted Rosa was at the same
time the church that codified and controlled her.
Just as Rosa had emulated the image of Catherine of Siena that had been pro¬
moted by the latter’s influential confessor/biographer Raymond of Capua, so did
girls attempt to emulate Rosa after her death.85 Girls would model their lives on
Rosa’s extreme penances and preparation for mystical union. And just as Rosa’s case
often provoked contradictory official responses, her imitators often encountered am¬
biguous dictates about holiness. Speaking to beatas about to become nuns at the new
Convent of Santa Rosa in Puebla, Mexico, the Dominican Sebastian de Santander y
Torres warned of the dangers of imitating Rosa’s life. Using the metaphor of the
mustard seed for women with a religious vocation, he says that three out of four
seeds thrown into the ground outside the cloister will waste away, “as the most ap¬
propriate place for a virgin is the cloister of a convent.”86 Well aware of post-
Tridentine efforts to enclose religious women, he is in a quandary as to how to exalt
the virtues of the convent’s patron saint, recognizing that she did not enter a con¬
vent.. The women he addresses were to imitate their patron, but only to a point.
Although enclosure ensured an easier road to virtue, it seemed to foreclose the pos¬
sibility of achieving heroic virtue, for nuns would never be as sorely tested as their
lay sisters. Only one nun from Spanish America, the Puebla Carmelite Marfa de Jesus
Tomelfn (1574—1637), advanced to the first stage of consideration for sainthood. The
only other American woman to become a saint was Mariana de Jesus (1618—1645), a
42 POTENTIAL SAINTS

beata who imitated Rosa in the city of Quito. But she was only canonized in 1950
(beatified in 1853), centuries after the threat of lay female piety had disappeared. Even
Teresa of Avila, who became the Counter-Reformation female saint par excellence,
who had upheld the mandate for moderate penances and had advocated strict enclo¬
sure, did not herself always remain enclosed.87 She frequently had to break enclosure
in order to travel and set up new houses. These contradictory models for female
holiness permeated the period.
Rosa de Lima’s case illustrates the complex and intimate connections between
hagiography, emulation, confessional life writings, and canonization and Inquisition
practices. There was a dynamic interplay among local agendas, the court in Madrid,
the institutional church in Lima and Rome, individual confessors, hagiographers, and
women’s spiritual experiences and writings. At each level, the rules for holy behavior
underwent reinterpretation. Hagiographic representation of Rosa’s life united America
with the Universal Catholic Church and attempted to control local lay movements.
But the changing portrayals of her life over time also reflect the shifting official line
between sanctity and heresy and the ever-narrowing role for religious women out¬
side the cloister. The same circumstances that provided Rosa with an opportunity
to undertake spiritually heroic acts also made her, or her imitators, a threat to the
church. In the process of dissecting this elaborate weave, we gain a richer understanding
of how holy individuals—in particular, this Peruvian lay woman—played an essen¬
tial part in defining the identity of the Counter-Reformation church and of Spanish
American colonial society.

Chronology of Rosa de Lima

1586 Born Isabel Gaspar y Flores Oliva, in Lima, Peru.

ca. 1593 Moves to the Andean town of Quives.
ca. 1596 Returns to Lima.
1603 Dons the third-order Franciscan habit.
1606 Becomes associated with third-order Dominicans, makes a general
confession, and writes spiritual accounts.
ca. 1608—1611 Creates Las mercedes and La escala mistica.
ca. 1613 Moves to the de la Maza household.
1614 Examined by the Inquisition.
1615 Dutch siege of the Port of Callao.
1617 Dies.
1617—1619 Proceso ordinario is begun in Lima by the archbishop; includes the
first Vida of Rosa by Pedro de Loayza
1619 Sermon solemne by Luis de Bilbao is given and published.
1622 The Inquisition begins an inquiry into the lives of Rosa’s follow¬
ers. The Inquisition confiscates Rosa’s texts and belongings. The
Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena is founded in Lima.
1624 Rosa’s cult is suspended; internal conflict appears in the Domini¬
can order.
1625 Auto-da-fe punishes alumbradas.
 Rosa de Lima 43

1630—1632 The Holy See in Rome initiates and oversees the Proceso apostolico.
1633 King Philip IV sends material about Rosa’s case to Rome.
1634 Rosa is formally proposed for sainthood. Her case is blocked by
the new fifty-year rule established by Pope Urban VIII.
1656 The process is reopened.
1664 Leonard Hansen’s Vida of Rosa is published for the first time.
1668 Rosa is beatified.
1670 Rosa is named patron of America and the Philippines by Pope
Clement X.
1671 Rosa is canonized Rosa de Santa Marla and popularized as Rosa
de Lima.
2

La China Pohlana
Catarina de San Juan (ca. l6oy—t6S8j

Hagiography and the Inquisition

Everything your ministers and your Christians tell me I Jail to perceive, nor to
understand, because I am a simpleton, a little creature with no memory, nor
understanding; speak to me in my tongue, Lord, so that I will know Your will; let
Your voice sound sweetly in my ears, for I am ready to hear You and obey You.
—Alonso Ramos, quoting Catarma de San Juan, De los prodigios, vol. 3, 68

[De los prodigios] contains revelations, visions, and apparitions that are useless
and improbable and full of contradictions and improper, indecent, and dangerous
comparisons . . . [and] dangerous doctrines that contradict the understandings of the
Doctors and practices of the Universal Catholic Church on no more grounds than the
author’s vain beliefs.
—1692 Edict of the Spanish Inquisition

S ome fifteen years after bells had called Limenos to the streets to celebrate the
canonization of their first saint, people living in the other Spanish viceroyality,
New Spain, and its second largest city, Puebla de los Angeles, heard the death bells
toll for a visionary woman from Delhi, India, who had lived in their midst for nearly
seventy years. Hoping to catch a glimpse of her and to participate to some degree in
her holiness, crowds descended on the house where Catarina de San Juan’s body was
displayed on January 5, 1688.1 Over the next two days, the line of people waiting to
enter the house grew to be four blocks long. Although she was brought to America
as a slave by Portuguese pirates and sold to a couple in Puebla, Catarina had been a
free woman for nearly half a century and had become a popular if reclusive vision¬
ary. The widespread recognition of her holiness earned Catarina the sort of farewell
that was usually reserved for the highest elite: most of the city’s ranking ecclesiasti¬
cal and civic officials attended an elaborate funeral mass, and she was buried in the
Jesuit Church of the Colegio del Esplritu Santo. The laudatory biographical sermon
delivered at Catarina’s funeral- and two hagiographic biographies about her were
published within four years of her death. In addition, several portraits of her went

44
 Catarina de San Juan

into circulation, and the little room (aposentilla) where she had spent much of her time
praying was converted into an altar dedicated to her memory. Like Rosa, Catarina
was deemed by her local community to have led a saintly life worthy of veneration.
The outpouring of popular devotion to Catarina de San Juan and the initial
ecclesiastical support for it exemplifies the rise of spontaneous religious devotions
in seventeenth-century Spanish America, and in Puebla in particular. Equally illus¬
trative of the interplay between individual lives, society, and the role of the church is
the denouement of Catarina s story as a local religious heroine. It provides a case
study for what could go awry with cults, canonization, and hagiography. Within three
years of her death, the Mexican Inquisition had prohibited the display of her por¬
trait; by 1692, the Spanish Inquisition had banned one of the biographies on the
grounds that it was blasphemous; and by 1696, eight years after Catarina’s death, the
Mexican Holy Office had followed suit, demanding that the biography be confis¬
cated throughout the viceroyalty and ordering the altar dedicated to her to be boarded
up. What caused the sudden campaign against devotion to Catarina de San Juan?
What definitions and guidelines did church leaders use to determine sanctity and
blasphemy, orthodoxy and heterodoxy?
Despite church efforts to control the dissemination of Catarina de San Juan’s
life story, she has been a popular local figure in Puebla and in Mexican history. Studied
mostly for her strong association with the construction of Puebla’s identity—first
as a local hero at the end of the seventeenth century and later as a nineteenth-century
Romantic figure, as the China Poblana (all peoples from Asia were called “chinos”
and “poblana” refers to people living in Puebla)—such notable Mexican scholars as
Francisco de la Maza, Nicolas Leon, and, more recently, Antonio Rubial have ex¬
plored the development of Catarina de San Juan as an almost legendary figure. Rubial,
in particular, highlights the role of hagiography in this process. A recent dissertation
by Ronald J. Morgan further explores the relationship between one hagiographic
biography on Catarina and the ambitions of her Jesuit biographer-confessor. What
has not been examined in depth is the dynamic relationship between the literary
hagiographic representation of Catarina and the shuffling of rules and regulations
between Europe and Spanish America as the latter sought to write foundational
narratives about saintly local heroes.
In theory, the same rules established by Pope Urban VIII and used for Rosa’s
canonization and hagiograhies were in effect for Catarina de San Juan. And yet, we
saw that the line between Rosa’s holiness and her followers’ heresy was a thin and
mercurial one: church and Crown politics, Counter-Reformation dictates, and the
textual representation of sanctity played important roles in determining holiness. Like
Rosa, Catarina was a lay beata who lived among the people of her city. Unlike Rosa,
however, she was a non-white foreigner and associated with the particularly power¬
ful—if at times problematic—religious order of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
Whereas biographies of America’s first saint became a staple for every Spanish
American convent and were widely imitated, as we will see, dissemination of Catarina’s
life story was curbed. Despite local efforts, her case was never heard by the Congre¬
gation of Holy Rites: while Poblanos struggled to sanctify one of their own, edicts
from the Peninsula and Rome blocked their attempts. What was at stake in the
46 POTENTIAL SAINTS

posthumous literary representation of Catarina’s life? The transatlantic exchanges

about her case illustrate another side of the Inquisition’s regulation of spirituality:
for rather than conducting first-hand inquiries into lives and personal writings, the
Inquisition in this case scrutinized and controlled books, specifically official church
texts such as vidas, sermons, and religious chronicles about holy people.
By 1600 the Holy Office was firmly rooted in American soil, where like its Pen¬
insular counterpart, it fought daily to maintain the religious and social status quo by
controlling people, books, and ideas. Although the Holy Office was first run by monks
and later by bishops, in 1571 the king of Spain himself took control of the Inquisi¬
tion, in response to perceived abuses and ineffective administration on the part of
local ecclesiastics. Striving to decrease mistreatment of the Spanish and Indian popu¬
lations (the latter, in fact, became exempt from the Inquisition’s control), as well as
conflicts between regular and secular clergy, the 1571 edict put into place a new bu¬
reaucracy that included expert prosecutors and calificadores who were to examine and
prepare reports about both people and printed matter of questionable orthodoxy.
As Richard Greenleaf notes, the majority of studies about the Mexican Inquisi¬
tion have focused on heretics tried by the Holy Office rather than on how heresy
itself was repressed.2 Yet, the restriction of reading materials and of the circulation
of ideas among New Spanish inhabitants occupied a major portion of the Inquisition’s
efforts—indeed, it is in this area that the Holy Office was most successful until the
eighteenth century.3 American colonists were seen by the Counter-Reformation
Church as Christians living among hoards of neophyte Indians who were more vul¬
nerable than those of European extraction to heretical ideas and to the poor examples
set by fiction; as a consequence, in theory the colonists were allowed to read only
books that had passed the inspection of the Inquisition. A 1571 edict made it a crime
to read prohibited books, while another ordered that all such books be turned in to
the Holy Office. Two years later, the Inquisition distributed the official Index of
Prohibited Books to the population and created an infrastructure to search ships
arriving in New Spain and to monitor book dealers and publishers in major cities.
Although many books slipped through the cracks of this system, it is a telling ex¬
ample of the ideological hegemony the church tried to impose.4
The vicissitudes of the biographical portraits of Catarina de San Juan illustrate
the often complex dynamics involved in determining the orthodoxy of texts and the
representation of holy women in New Spam. Surprisingly, the 1689 publication of
the first volume of the Jesuit Alonso Ramos’s biography of Catarina, Primera parte de
los prodigios de la omnipotencia. Y milagros de la gratia en la vida de la Venerable Sierva de Dios
Catbarina de S. Joan ... [First part of the Almighty’s wonders and miracles that graced
the life of the Venerable Servant of God Catharina de S. Joan]5—the volume that
would later be banned by the Inquisition—was at first approved by many of New
Spain’s highest-ranking ecclesiastical officials, even including a calificador for the In¬
quisition. Published within a year of the first part, the second volume also met with
success. But soon the tide turned, and in the same year the final volume was pub¬
lished (1692), the first had been put on the Index of Prohibited Books in Spain. (See
figure 2.i.) In a strikingly slow_ response, New Spam followed suit four years later.
And yet, in the same year that Ramos’s first volume was censored in the Peninsula,
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Figure 2.1 Title page of De los prodigios de la omnipotencia ... en la vida de. . . Catharina de
S. Joan (vol. 1), by Alonso Ramos, 1689 (Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Bloomington,
Indiana)
48 POTENTIAL SAINTS

a much shorter version of Catarina’s life story, Compendio de la viday virtudes de la vener~
able Catarina de San Juan [Compendium of the life and virtues of the venerable Catarina
de San Juan],6 was allowed to be published in Puebla by the cleric Jose Castillo de
Graxeda. Why should a biography of a woman who was never brought before the
Inquisition for questioning about her visions and prophecies be first approved and
then prohibited by the Holy Office? What did Ramos’s version contain, or possibly
omit, that condemned it while Graxeda’s was allowed to stand? Do the Prodigios con¬
tain troublesome elements that “canonized” biographies, like Hansen’s Vida of Rosa,
did not? If not aimed at the circumstances of Catarina’s life, why was the Inquisition
concerned about the written representation of her life?
As we will see in this discussion, new rules established by the Counter-Reformation
requiring historical documentation for the canonization process and new practices
for representing holiness had as much to do with Ramos’s failure and Graxeda’s success
as the Inquisition’s rules for determining blasphemous books. As mentioned in chapter
1, the Council of Trent revamped the guidelines for sainthood to combat criticism
of Catholicism’s emphasis on affective spirituality and its cult of the saints. The new
rules were heavily influenced by Renaissance humanist theories about historical truth.
Ramos’s extravagant claims and exclamations about the candidate’s holiness clashed
with the hagiographic requirements. The inclusion of somewhat unorthodox mate¬
rial, coupled with local politics, further tipped the scales against Ramos’s work.
Graxeda’s text, however, attempts to balance the exotic appeal of Catarina’s story
with the historical rigor demanded by the church.

Catarina de San Juan and Puebla de los Angeles

History confirms few facts with regard to Catarina de San Juan, but her biographers
concur on the general chronology and significant events of her life. All accounts plot
a compelling story that echoes elements from the most popular forms of baroque
narrative, including captive’s tales, picaresque novels, and, of course, hagiographic
biography. A composite account follows: born of feagan royal parents in the Mogul
empire of India, Catarina (born Mirrha) was singled out at birth for special favors
by the Virgin Mary. Among other incidents, she was miraculously saved as a toddler
after having fallen into a river more than three days before. Within a decade of her
birth, however, local wars forced Catarina and her family to flee to the coast, where
the child was kidnaped by Portuguese slave traders.7
Catarina was taken first to Cochin and then to Manila, where she came into
contact with Jesuit missionaries for the first time and converted to Christianity. In
1619, she was chosen as a house slave for the viceroy of New Spain, and the Portu¬
guese took the adolescent girl to Acapulco. Here a change in fortune resulted in the
childless couple, Margarita Chavez and Miguel Sosa, buying her and making her a
privileged domestic servant. Upon Miguel’s death in 1624 and her mistress’s subse¬
quent decision to enter the convent, Catarina was given her freedom and offered a
place in the convent as a lay servant, which, like Rosa before her, she chose not to
accept. Soon she took a position as a domestic servant for the noted priest, Pedro
Suarez, who at one time had served as confessor for Puebla’s most famous local holy
 Catarina de San Juan

woman, the nun Maria de Jesus Tomelin. Although Catarina had already taken a
vow of chastity and had prayed (successfully, according to the accounts) to look old
and ugly in order to ward off men’s advances, Suarez ordered her to marry his “chino”
slave, Domingo. She now fought heroically to maintain a chaste marriage with an
abusive husband.
By the 1640s, both husband and master had died, and Catarina at last was free
to devote her life to Christ as a lay holy woman, a beata. She took no formal religious
vows, but lived a life of reclusion, prayer, and penance in a small room that a wealthy
neighbor had given her across from Catarina’s favorite church, El Colegio del Espiritu
Santo, run by the Jesuits. She appears to have supported herself by sewing and mak¬
ing chocolate. Later, an elite couple. Captain Don Hypolito Castillo y Altra and his
wife Doha Juana Mexia Moscoso, took Catarina under their wing. As in Rosa’s case,
Catarina’s benefactors provided her with room and board while she provided spiri¬
tual benefits to the household. Within these confines, Catarina exemplified Chris¬
tian virtue. She dedicated her life to works of charity and prayer. Biographers report
her generosity with beggars, her supernatural gift for reviving moribund dogs, and
her wise counsel to people who sought her guidance. Yet the majority of her time
was spent praying for the larger Christian community, experiencing visions of a host
of heavenly figures, and making prophecies about Jesuit souls, important political
and ecclesiastical figures, and events in the Spanish empire, such as the arrival of ships
from Spam and battles in Europe. During these years in Puebla, Catarina was under
the guidance of a noted Jesuit, Miguel Godinez, the author of an important guide
about mysticism. He even gave her several devotional books, although others had to
read them to her since she was illiterate. Significantly, Godinez and other local clergy
considered Catarina a bonafide mystic, blessed with God’s special mercies and vi¬
sions. Local townspeople knew Catarina because she could often be seen praying
at the Jesuit church or performing acts of charity. She lived the last four decades of
her life under the protection of the Jesuits, following this charitable, contemplative,
visionary path.
Nearly blind and half-paralyzed by a stroke, Catarina de San Juan died in 1688.
Her last will and testament provide a glimpse of her poverty and devotion, as she
donated her few belongings to the poor: a statue of Christ, a few paintings and de¬
votional books, a small box, and her clothing.8 Upon her death, commoners and high-
ranking officials alike declared that the octogenarian China Poblana had died in the
“odor of sanctity.” As mentioned, crowds fought to see her one last time before her
burial; many reportedly tried to tear off a bit of her tunic in order to have a personal
relic that might provide a powerful link to this charismatic woman.
As these highly charged scenes of popular devotion suggest, Catarina de San
Juan lived in a deeply religious society that believed in the importance and efficacy
of local holy people bringing special divine favor to their community. The biogra¬
phies written about Catarina contribute to this broader religious and spiritual phe¬
nomenon occurring in Puebla; the city tops the list of colonial Spanish cities devoted
to publishing the life stories of its holy people. In many ways, Puebla was the criollo
center of Spanish America, and its publication efforts reflect this status. Unlike the
two viceregal centers in Lima and Mexico City, Puebla elite prided themselves on
50 POTENTIAL SAINTS

having the largest percentage of criollo population, riches, and religious institutions.
Located on the Royal Road that led from the key port of Vera Cruz to Mexico
City, Puebla was a rich center for farming, trading, and the textile industry. Local
merchants and landholders of Spanish descent were eager to establish the impor¬
tance of their city to the Spanish Empire and Christian history. Promoting local
religious heroes was key to the process. Like the other mostly feminine subjects of
these hagiographic vidas, Catarina is lauded for continuing the spiritual conquest of
America that had begun more than a century before by the conquistadors: through
creating a virtual paradise of Christian virtue in the “New World,” she served as a
valuable example to both the New World and the Old.9
Curiously, although Catarina de San Juan was clearly not a criolla, she was inti¬
mately linked from her first years with the most significant criollo male and female
church members in seventeenth-century New Spain. The founder of the Carmelite
convent in Puebla, Isabel de la Encarnacion, and the Conceptionist Maria de Jesus
Tomelin, who was heavily promoted for beatification, had been informal spiritual
teachers for Catarina; she had talked with both women, particularly with the latter,
through convent grilles, as well as by supernatural communication.10 Of the host of
notable seventeenth-century clerics who had been involved in creating these exem¬
plars of holiness, four men became especially involved in Catarina de San Juan’s
spiritual path. Juan Palafox y Mendoza, the controversial bishop of Puebla from 1640
to 1649, was himself entered into the canonization process. His successor, Manuel
Fernandez de Santa Cruz, is well known in our century for his role as the real ad¬
dressee of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s Respuesta, but he was famed in his own epoch
for founding many religious institutions and promoting Marla de Jesus’s case in Rome.
The Jesuit Antonio Nunez de Miranda had been Sor Juana’s antagonistic confessor,
as well as a noted theologian and calificador Miguel Godinez, as noted above, was the
influential Jesuit author of several manuals on mysticism. Although Spanish law
prohibited the non-white Catarina from being a nun, a prestigious status that re¬
quired full Spanish ancestry and often a hefty dowry, race did not keep her from
intimate contact with prominent religious figures.

Hagiographies and Biographies

With all the attention that Catarina received from male and female spiritual leaders,
it is not surprising that she was an important figure in society and the subject of no
fewer than three biographies. What is surprising, perhaps, is that a city that prided
itself on its criollismo would arduously promote a non-white, non-native woman as
a symbol for their city. One of her biographers proclaims:

The Lord could not have designated the purpose or the glory of this work
except to the very Illustrious and Imperial City of Puebla de los Angeles;
for the great Emperor Charles V . . . had desired to ennoble it with his own
coat of arms. . . . From the time the Handmaid of the Lord entered this
city, it had two paired coats of arms: those of the Emperor, which ennoble
it, and those of Catharina, which defend it; the Handmaid of the Lord was
 Catarina de San Juan 51

the most efficient weapon Puebla had, for many times she defended it from
enemies.11

Although there are a fair number of other vidas published about exemplary na¬
tive American men and women, none are as extensive as the works on Catarina de
San Juan.1- In fact, Ramos’s three-volume De losprodigios weighs in as the longest work
published in New Spain.13 And yet, it is the only vida that I have found to date that
was censored by the Inquisition; because so many licenses were required for publica¬
tion, most problematic texts were censored before they even went to press. A closer
look at the narrative construction and content of the biography of Catarina de San
Juan reveals a complex, dynamic process in which literary representation and doc¬
trine were perhaps as important as religious affiliations and race.
Although this discussion focuses on the portraits of Catarina de San Juan in
Ramos’s and Graxeda’s full-length biographies, the Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera’s
hagiographic Sermon en que se da noticia de la vida... de la Venerable Senora Cbatharima de San
Joan [Sermon reporting the life ... of the Venerable Senora Chatharima de San Joan]
(1688) deserves mention as the founding narrative for her story; he sketches themes
that will show up full-blown in Ramos’s biography. First delivered shortly after her
death to an emotionally charged group of Poblanos attending her funeral, the ser¬
mon introduces the China Poblana as an exotic woman with prolific miraculous
powers. Relying on baroque literary paradoxes and antitheses to inspire wonder and
emulation in the listener/reader, Aguilera provides paradigmatic incidents as clear
evidence of her chosen status. Catarina’s rescue from the river parallels Moses’s be¬
ginnings; her kidnapping reads like a Byzantine novel; and her undying desire for
chastity persuades God to grant Catarina her wish to turn her beautiful white face
into that of an ugly, old dark woman. As far as available records demonstrate, this
biography written for Catarina’s funeral was banned by the Inquisition only when it
was republished with Ramos’s third volume.14 The style is concise and dramatic,
employing a fair amount of reported dialogue between Catarina and others. As the
title indicates, Aguilera’s narrative develops the conventional tri-part hagiographic
narrative: a chronological life story (vida), a list of virtues (virtudes), and exemplary
death (muerte'). Several elements might raise eyebrows, such as his story of the Virgen
de Loreto and the Virgen de la Congregacion being jealous of each other because of
Catarina’s simultaneous devotion to both.15 More notably for our purposes, Ramos
extravagantly develops what we would call today a discourse on race, but in colonial
times would have been referred to as castas and the question of “purity of blood”
(limpieza de sangre). Perhaps echoing in part The Song of Songs, where the bride is lovely
for her blackness, Aguilera recreates a dialogue in which God reveals to Catarina his
preference for “wheat-colored” (trigueno) brides over white saints like St. Ine's: “Look
how white and beautiful St. Ine's is; this other beautiful and white one is St. Catherine
the Martyr; this wheat-colored one is you. You are the most beautiful.”16 Surpris¬
ingly, Catarina is compared with white saints and comes out on top.
In contrast to Aguilera’s relatively brief hagiographical sketch, Ramos’s three-
volume De los prodigios is a physical testimony to his efforts to prove beyond a shadow
of a doubt the case for his spiritual daughter’s sanctity. An influential figure within
52 POTENTIAL SAINTS

the powerful Jesuit order, Ramos occupied for a period of time the position of rec¬
tor of the order in Puebla and had served as Catarina’s confessor for nearly fifteen
years. Both positions help explain how he could publish a triple-decker comprising
over five-hundred pages printed on high-quality paper—a fact that graphically il¬
lustrates the expense the Jesuits and their benefactors were willing to incur in order
to promote the woman whom they hoped would make their order and Puebla fa¬
mous. Obviously not meant for private consumption, De los prodigtos functions as an
epic story of New Spain’s identity. In fact, Ramos opens his dedication to the third
volume by thanking his benefactor for footing the bill for the previous and present
volumes. The expense, he explains, glorifies Puebla.17 The epic, however, went over¬
board even by the baroque standards of the time, when narratives frequently celebrated
exuberantly awe-mspiring stories that juxtapose the spirit and the flesh, vice and vir¬
tue, licentiousness and virginity, the exotic and the familiar.
Depicted in an affective, florid style in Ramos’s biography, Catarina de San Juan
becomes an anagram of a marvelous, exotic, deeply holy ascetic. Like Hansen's biog¬
raphy of Rosa, Ramos reveals a fascination with his subject’s virginal body and the
heroic tests of virtue it had to endure on both the human and supernatural planes;
but Ramos delves into elaborate, “prodigious” detail. Upon her kidnaping by pi¬
rates, for example, the prepubescent Catarina becomes the target of men’s lust, barely
surviving with chastity intact a series of assaults by men who either want to own her
or to marry her. In one of the first scenes, Ramos describes how Catarina’s Portu¬
guese kidnappers begin a brawl that injures her. Expanding on Aguilera’s depiction
of the event, Ramos draws a scriptural parallel with the spilling of Christ’s blood:

The disagreements and disputes among the pirates grew to such a pitch
that, dividing into factions, they fell to swordplay and spear-throwing; until
one of the soldiers, seeing the quarrel turn so bloody, said (speaking to his
comrades), “It is better for one person to die, rather than that all of us
perish.” Similar counsel was spoken by Caiaphas the High Priest to the Jews
in the council that their malice had formed against Christ. But this soldier,
speaking and acting without advice, hurled a pike or lance toward that in¬
nocent young girl with the intention of ending her life, so that the life of
an innocent ewe lamb would become a rainbow of peace among so many
criminals. But the thoughtless and cruel pirate did not succeed in his de¬
sign, for either because the girl dodged or because a hand from above less¬
ened the thrust of the lance, it pierced only her thigh; and the blood that
flowed from the wound was enough that, saddened and compassionate, they
dropped their anger and their dispute; and that, leaving all their weapons,
they went to dress her wound; and thus her innocent blood so spilled be¬
came a bond of harmony and concord. They then returned to the Bageles,
and one of the principal captains, having won her, kept her, with the obli¬
gation to heal her and to treat her as a daughter and not as a slave.18

Saved by a bloodied leg, the young girl moves from one bad situation to an¬
other. A merchant falls in love with her beauty, buys her, and shelters her in a woman’s
house, planning to marry the girl when she becomes of age. These plans collapse
 Catarina de San Juan 53

when the insanely jealous woman beats Catarina in order to make her ugly and thus
herself marry the merchant. When this ploy fails, the woman attempts to drown
Catarina. Ramos depicts with flourish the abuse the young girl endures:

This jealous woman decided to vent her anger on the beauty that she judged
to be the cause or the occasion of her own rejection; undertaking to rob
her of her natural loveliness, she mistreated her in word and in deed, often
seeking to wear her down to nothing, disheveling her bit by bit, dragging
her by the hair, flogging her, cudgeling her, and disfiguring her cheeks with
the blood flowing from her wounds. She saw to it that hunger withered
away the color and the pleasing qualities of her face: and finally she be¬
came the drudge of a vindictive, excessively jealous woman, for no other
crime but that of being the beautiful and beloved Mirrha, and with no other
prospect than that of being the object of an invidious loathing. This last
grew to such a height that, unable to sufficiently avenge her anger and ap¬
pease her wrath with the blood of an innocent ewe lamb, she tried time and
again to take her life. Her anger prepared knives, with the resolution of
killing her; but her fear lest the blood so spilled should cry out, like that of
Abel, which clamored against invidious fratricide, curbed her and held her
back. It seemed to her that killing her bloodlessly and out of sight would
hide her wickedness; and thus she resolved on another, more treacherous
deed, which was to fling her into the sea weighted down by a stone, so that
the studied cunning of her rage might be taken for a possible mishap. In a
fury she carried out this perfidy, but by Mirrha’s good fortune, an anchor
had already been set by Divine Providence at the place where she had fallen,
so that raising herself by the cable she was able to pull her head out of the
water and cry out for help, succor, and Baptism, which was her principal
and only concern; she was rescued by a Portuguese nobleman who was near
the seaside, like a foreordained instrument of Divine Omnipotence, to lib¬
erate her from the shipwreck and preserve her life as in other dangers.
Through this lucky mishap this young girl was settled in another house,
where, when her Mogul suitor saw her loveliness and beauty emaciated and
disfigured, his love passed over to the Mogul lady who had so anxiously
sought him.19

After Catarina is deserted by the Mogul merchant, yet another man enamored
of her beauty goes mad when he cannot have Catarina, but another change in for¬
tune takes her to New Spain, where she was sold as a house slave. Even en route to
New Spam, however, Ramos paints the titillating scene of a sailor who desires her,
even though (or, perhaps, because) she is now disguised as a young man (mancebo) as
a ruse to elude the viceroy’s messenger who awaits her at the port in Acapulco to
take her to Mexico City. The disguise a success, Catarina makes her way to Puebla
where under her new masters she enjoys a few years of relative peace from men’s
sexual advances until her owner dies and she is forced by her new master to marry
his slave, Domingo. Frustrated and jealous because Catarina insists on remaining
faithful to her Divine Spouse, Domingo subjects her to years of physical abuse. Later
54 POTENTIAL SAINTS

he takes a mistress with whom he has a child, and at his death Catarina is left with
not only his debts but also the child.
If Ramos’s version of Catarina’s relationships with men is melodramatic and
serves to create a portrait of Catarina as a sort of martyr, the treatment of her pro¬
phetic nature and supernatural encounters is perhaps even more theatrical and dar¬
ing. The title itself, De los prodigios de la ominpotencia. Y milagros de la gracia en la vida... ,
suggests the first deviation from acceptable seventeenth-century hagiographic con¬
vention. Although there was a degree of variation, most titles included something to
the effect of Aguilera’s tri-part vida, virtudes y muerte. According to the guidelines es¬
tablished after the Council of Trent and Pope Urban VIII’s reform, authors were to
refrain from judging events as miracles or their subjects as saints: this was now the
domain of the Congregation of Holy Rites and the pope himself. Clearly Ramos
rejects a straightforward, humble title and claims from the start the singularity of his
subject’s life. The first two volumes, published within a year of each other (1689,
1690), comprise more than five-hundred pages.20 Recounting the chronological life
of Catarina and enumerating her heroic virtues, they spill over with elaborate ac¬
counts of Catarina as the wonder of the Spanish empire.
Like Rosa, Catarina intercedes on Spain’s behalf in its European conflicts and
commerce, comes to the aid of a troubled monarchy, and at times even is mystically
transported to aid the Jesuit missionary project in the Mexican borderlands and in
the Philippines. She is clearly inscribed into a story of the Jesuit and New Spanish
contribution to the empire. Ramos’s flair for descriptive symbolism and scriptural
parallels comes through in an account of Catarina’s vision of Carlos II’s royal wed¬
ding and her subsequent prophecy about royal succession. Catarina sees a monstrous
creature: “A monstrous fish, whose ugliness and ferocity caused her horror, and which
she was unable to describe, calling it now a shark, now an alligator, now a sea mon¬
ster; for it had a peculiar and abominable shape, with scales so spotted and mottled
as to make it horrible to see.”21 It circles around the queen and threatens to deform
the child she was to carry. With her fervent supplications, God grants Catarina’s wish
that the queen give birth to a healthy child. Catarina emerges as having a divine con¬
nection—one powerful enough to play a part in the Crown’s destiny. Ramos con¬
cludes the passage with a scriptural parallel to authorize his tale:

Reader, to see that this vision was worthy of the most profound and lengthy
explications, compare it with what St. John the Evangelist has left us writ¬
ten in the twelfth chapter of his Apocalypse, and you will discover how
uniformly God speaks and communicates his secrets in all ages to his ser¬
vants and chosen ones; you will also see that everything could not but be
verified that he showed to his Chosen Benjamin about his sacred lastborn,
the Catholic Church, always persecuted and always victorious in the shape
of a prodigious woman.22

In situations dealing with Catarina’s ability to intercede and change the out¬
come of historically documentable incidents, Ramos occasionally interjects a short
statement about his methodology, even citing secondary sources or including letters
from other clergy that confirm his own account (for example, volume 1, chap. 28).
 Catarina de San Juan 55

But once he moves outside the realm of historical events, Ramos often includes rather
shocking tales of encounters with the divine and adds little authorial reflection on
the veracity of the content. In recounting these scenes, Ramos often discusses hear¬
ing Catarina talk of these incidents in the confessional and, at times even quoting
her, in language that sounds more like scripted speeches transferred into simple lan¬
guage than real conversations.23
In one recurring case, he takes the mystical commonplace of the husband-bride
relationship to such an extreme that several critics view it as the basis for the censor¬
ship of the entire book. The biographer describes how Catarina endured a series of
amorous struggles (luchas amorosas) with Christ, engaging for years in debates with a
nearly naked Son of God who reveals himself to his beloved:

On one occasion, the Lord showed himself to her in that same form of a
child, but almost naked, much as we are accustomed to dress his images on
the feast of his Resurrection, or of his Nativity in the manger: in the latter
season Catharina was always most solicitous to clothe Christ, naked in his
most holy birth, and with the above-mentioned apparition, it appears that
the Lord responded to her wishes, saying to her, like someone longing to
throw himself into her lap and her chaste embrace: “Catharina, will you
dress me?” The charity and love of this, his beloved and dear Spouse, grew
with this vision, almost to the point of causing a rapture, and rendering
violent her impulse to clasp the Child God in her arms, to no longer be
held back by the shackles of her virginal reserve, being frightened by the
nakedness of her only and Divine Lover: and thus she said to him, or asked
him, “Why haven’t you come dressed? Did you lack angels, and your
Mother, to cover with precious cloths the loveliness and beauty that the
heavenly courts gaze on and enjoy?” He answered her that he wanted it to
be she who dressed and adorned him. Catharina replied that she had noth¬
ing to clothe him with, nor hands to touch him with, nor even eyes to see
him naked, and, succeeding in turning aside her gaze from that God of
Purity, her Divine Lover, she would have wished to hide, and sink deep
into the center of the earth. . .. But when she was more off her guard, she
found herself one day with the same sight, and with manifestations and with
the most affectionate expressions of yearning to receive the clothing he had
requested from the hands of his beloved. Even though Catharina responded
with new, greater, and more ample refusals of his loving purity, that he
should leave her alone, go away, disappear; for this nakedness of his hu¬
manized divinity frightened and unnerved her, and she could not find the
strength to embrace him; seeing him so naked caused her no less embar¬
rassment than divine horror, until such time as she might see him decently
clothed to human eyes. This loving dispute between the Divine Love and
his beloved spouse went on for more than two years.24

A tantalizing image of a woman of such modesty that she refused even to let anyone
shake her vile, unworthy hand is eroticized when Catarina is pursued by a God made
man and refuses to bow to her beloved’s supplications. These gripping tales of ag-
56 POTENTIAL SAINTS

gression and submission, sexual desire and chastity embellish the few documented
facts of Catarina’s life.
Notably, the third volume (constituting Parts 3 and 4)—published in the final
months of 1692, the same year volumes 1 and 2 were put on the Index of Prohibited
Books in Spain—shows much more restraint. The third volume comprises about 120
folios and recounts Catarina’s virtues and death. Perhaps aware of the Inquisition’s
censorship and probably in competition with the short biography that was published
the same year, volume 3 dramatically diminishes the number and extent of super¬
natural events recounted. Ramos refers the reader to volumes 1 and 2 to “avoid lengthi¬
ness” (evitar prolijidad') (vol. 3, 16) and insists on the historical nature of his work,
including numerous testimonies from other people.25
And yet, Ramos continues to use Catarina as a foil for his own purposes. He
highlights his own role as the confessor to such an extraordinary woman and
often expounds his own ideas regarding delicate doctrinal points, such as the church’s
stance about souls that have not received baptism. Using Catarina’s concern about
the salvation of her brother, Ramos launches into his opinion on the doctrine of
salvation, limbo, and hell, but then explains how he is in keeping with the church’s
teachings:

Up to here the fact and the historical vision, in which, although extraordi¬
nary, on reexamining it with due consideration, I find nothing opposed to
it or dissonant with Christian Doctrine and Catholic Theology of Baptism;
but because it may have some influence and provoke some discussions when
divulged to learned or ignorant men, it has seemed convenient to me to
explain it, first stating my own feeling and afterward what one might re¬
flect on when one compares [it with] the whole vision, and its significance
with the learning of the Catholic Faith, with the judgment of the Saints
and Theologians, who are the interpreters of Christ’s Law within His Holy
Church.26

In some regards, Ramos’s third volume anticipates—at least at a rhetorical level,

if not in fact—the style used by Jose Castillo de Graxeda in the third biography written
about Catarina de San Juan. Whereas Ramos’s work is the coffee table showpiece,
Graxeda’s Compendio (1692), represents the portable paperback, consisting of fewer
than 150 cuarto-sized pages (that is, a page one-fourth the size of Ramos’s folios). In
striking contrast to Ramos’s work, Graxeda recounts Catarina’s life before arriving
m Puebla in only two chapters, each one no more than a handful of pages. We are
simply told that Catarina endured many abuses because Domingo had married her
without fully understanding her vow to God. The detailed descriptions of Catarina
as first and foremost a sexual object who is subject to bloody, abusive, death-
threatening encounters with her husband disappear from this new portrait of the China
Poblana:

Since up to then he did not understand her, [Domingo] tried to avail him¬
self now of endearments, now of threats, now of harsh treatment, but she
only availed herself of the truth with which she admonished him and availed
 Catarina de San Juan

herself of the cries she raised to her divine Spouse, and availed herself of
many and devout anxieties with which she called out to the Virgin Mary.
If, at this resistance from Catarina, annoyance, irascibility, and ill-usage grew
in him, in her there grew all the more the steadfastness of her pledge and
27
VOW.

In addition, Graxeda never mentions Domingo’s mistress and child, but rather fo¬
cuses on how effectively Catarina wards off her husband’s advances with a cross stra¬
tegically placed between their two beds.
Although Ramos creates a fictional character who overcomes traumatic experi¬
ences, Graxeda glosses over the particulars of the suffering and paints a portrait of
model behavior, using an understated, condensed narrative style to depict an exotic
yet ideal holy woman. Catarina as a conventional model comes forth at particularly
crucial points in the narrative. When talking of one of the miracles attributed to her
(the case of a cross that sweated blood), Graxeda turns first to a simple, reasoned
portrait of her virtuous equanimity: “This venerable and devout woman was always
circumspect in her deeds, moderate in her words, sensible in her answers, discreet in
her works, prudent without passions, courteous without showiness, quiet without
insolence.”28 Catarina emerges as a credible source of divine favor and helps inspire
readers to model their own lives on these same behavioral codes.
In addition, Graxeda’s narrative terseness when dealing with the supernatural is
diametrically opposed to Ramos’s extravagance. Graxeda briefly lists a series of reve¬
lations Catarina received about Jesuits and the affairs of the Spanish empire, but they
are treated matter-of-factly, and the narrative highlights Catarina’s visions and dis¬
cernment of souls closer to home, focusing primarily on New Spam and Puebla. When
treating Catarina’s colloquies with heavenly figures, Graxeda selects several scenes to
describe in more detail, but he opens or closes the passages with a discussion of his
sources and method for recording such supernatural occurrences:

Before continuing, I would like to anticipate with the reader’s leave a ques¬
tion which may recur insistently to anyone, to wit, the question of why I
report the virtues that Catarina exercised in that youthful period of her life?
And how can I give information in such detail about what I never saw at
the time? And about more than that, if I never saw it? Therefore when I
communicated with her, she reported her virtues to me with the repugnance
of a good spirit that only speaks of her faults and not her virtues, leaving
those to the understanding of the person who directs her.29

Moreover, he cautiously leaves room for his superiors to judge the nature of certain
visions. For instance, in the case of Catarina’s vision of St. Anne (in which the young
Indian girl promised to live a chaste life), Graxeda claims that he cannot determine
the category of the vision (corporeal, intellectual, etc.): “I cannot ascertain the man¬
ner in which she received this favor, whether she was transported out of her senses
and faculties or whether it was an imaginary vision [i.e., seen with the imagination]
or whether she saw it visibly [i.e., with her normal physical eyesight], for as I wished
to know about the category of thing that happened to her, she was in the habit of
58 POTENTIAL SAINTS

telling me.”30 And, as one might have anticipated, no mention is made of a nearly
nude Christ.

The Inquisition, Hagiography, and Counter-Reformation Literature

In fact, Graxeda’s narrative method responds point by point to the charges the In¬
quisition made against Ramos’s text. The 1692 Spanish edict declared De los prodigios
to be indecent, unbelievable, and nearly blasphemous. Although we only have an
excerpt of the edict,31 it is clear that the Holy Office viewed the text as falling into
grave error regarding doctrinal content and narrative credibility: “Because it contains
revelations, visions, and apparitions that are useless and improbable and full of con¬
tradictions and improper, indecent, and dangerous comparisions—que sapiunt blasphemias
[that are almost blasphemous]—that abuse the highest and ineffable Mystery of the
Incarnation of the Son of God, and in other places, Holy Scripture and because it
contains dangerous doctrines that contradict the understandings of the Doctors and
practices of the Universal Catholic Church on no more grounds than the author’s
vain beliefs.”32 The charge reflects the dual line of inquiry that the Inquisition used
for judging texts: Did they contradict or undermine either the holy faith (la santa je)
or good taste (las buenas costumbresy In other words, narrative content and style had to
uphold Counter-Reformation doctrine and follow acceptable societal and literary
norms. Interestingly, the edict also points to Ramos’s “vain credulity,” a criticism
that reflects the church’s wish to establish a reputation for its historical rigor in de¬
termining evidence of the work of God.
Despite the fact that we have little information surrounding the discussion that
led to the Inquisition’s decision, the prefatory material to books published in New
Spain provides valuable information regarding a book’s approbation by secular and
sacred institutions. Whereas Graxeda’s biography opens with the standard licenses
from a calificador and another from the bishop’s office, Ramos’s introductory mate¬
rial in the first volume is overwhelmingly long and complex. More than seventy pages
of licenses, approvals, and letters from the highest-ranking ecclesiastics and govern¬
ment leaders arouse the reader’s curiosity about the need for such extensive docu¬
mentation.33 Is the biography already on trial, and does the ambiguity of the case
require extra witnesses? While all the highest authorities over Ramos—the viceroy,
bishop, and Jesuit superior—write formulaic statements, the calificadores and theolo¬
gians address in detail the text's ability to pass the Inquisition’s test that books con¬
tain no material “contra la fe y las buenas costumbres.” Likewise, the four extra
pareceres requested by Bishop Santa Cruz second this opinion, while also emphasizing
the significant role that Catarina de San Juan plays in Puebla history.
Key to understanding the tenor and purpose of this outpouring of support is
the personal letter that the calificador and one-time spiritual director of Catarina de
San Juan (who also is widely known as the confessor who was dismissed by Sor Juana
Ine's de la Cruz), Antonio Nunez de Miranda, writes to his Jesuit brother Ramos.
Strategically placed after the prologue and before the massive narrative, this non¬
standard letter from one of New Spain's most highly regarded theologians serves an
unusual purpose.34 Elsewhere in the prefatory pages, Nunez grants an official In-
 Catarina de San Juan

quisition license for publication of Ramos’s first volume, but the ten-page personal
letter reflects a certain anxiety about the text. His letter details seeds of doubt in two
areas. First, the “vast ocean” of examples of God’s handiwork seen in Catarina’s vi¬
sions, revelations, and prophecies might well make the reader seasick (marear) and
forget that God’s will alone can render one holy. Nunez warns that cases of self-
willed visions will bring people into the hands of the Inquisition, as indeed had hap¬
pened in the infamous case of the Peninsular abbess who had feigned stigmata, Sor
Maria de la Visitacion. Second, Nunez advises the reader to avoid the temptation to
skip ahead to passages about awe-inspiring, supernatural occurrences and instead to
focus on (and imitate) the narrative examples of humility and obedience exempli¬
fied by Catarina. With these caveats, Nunez, both as calificador and as a Jesuit per¬
sonally involved with Catarina's story, anticipates the charges that will be made later
against the biography. Yet he holds them at bay for a time with his defense, even
extending as an example of hope for Ramos the case of Saint Teresa’s autobiographical
vida, which was first withheld from publication by the Inquisition and later approved.
In striking contrast, Ramos’s second and third volumes contain far fewer licenses,
and the Inquisition’s approval is absent. The licenses are from the most powerful fig¬
ures in New Spain, the Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas and the Viceroy Conde de Galve;
two out of the three pareceres are from other members of the Jesuit order.35 Ramos
apparently either bypassed the Inquisition or did not need permission for a continua¬
tion of a vida. Although the absence of a license from the Inquisition might be explained
by Ramos’s move to Mexico City after the publication of volume x, it may also be in¬
dicative of trouble already brewing, as Nunez himself foresaw earlier.36
Although neither Ramos (in the 1692 publication) nor Graxeda reveals any
knowledge of the 1692 Spanish edict, the metadiscourse they employ about narrative
method points precisely to the problems Ramos’s text will have, or was having.
Whereas Ramos mentions issues of doctrine, historical rigor, and length, and recaps
his third volume with a full recognition of Pope Urban VIII’s rules for hagiography,37
from the first Graxeda diplomatically discusses the merits of Ramos’s biography but
asserts the value of his shorter Compendio. Although the compendium ostensibly aims
to make the wonders of Catarina’s life available to a wider public, Graxeda does
mention several motives for writing, which include concepts of truth and narrative
authority. The first motive is that he, too, had served as a spiritual director for the
holy woman; for eleven years he heard, up to three times a day, her stammered con¬
fession (su balbuciente pronuncion), which he came to understand as angelic or mystic
language. Graxeda reports that in one such rapture Catarina revealed that God wished
Graxeda to serve as her confessor, which he then interpreted as divine authorization
for his relationship with her and the source of his ability to bear witness to her life.
A second motive is implicit in the fact that even as Graxeda writes, death is knock¬
ing at his door. No doubt aware of the attempts to beatify Catarina, Graxeda con¬
fesses a sense of urgency and need to leave a permanent record of her story. A third,
unspoken motive was almost certainly the desire to undo the damage done to the
process of Catarina’s beatification—not to mention the credibility of her support¬
ers—by Ramos’s uncritical and extravagant approach to biography. From the outset
Graxeda signals that he takes very seriously his duty to keep to the verifiable facts.
6o POTENTIAL SAINTS

Echoing the humanist historians who had influenced the documentary quality of
hagiographic-inspired biography by the turn of the seventeenth century, Graxeda
declares: “Let it be known that everything that I report here, I saw, experienced, and
verified, proving that all of the material was truthful and reliable. Placing my hand
on my heart and making the sign of the cross, Iuro in verbo Sacerdoitis to tell the truth
in everything.”38 Although he assures his readers that he writes with Ramos’s bless¬
ing, a rivalry or tension with De los Prodigios emerges between the lines, as well as a
sense that the cause of Catarina’s beatification might be in danger because of Ramos’s
lack of historical rigor. Like his colleagues, Graxeda no doubt felt that Puebla could
not afford to lose such a good candidate for sainthood.
Graxeda comments on his historical method throughout the book until he comes
to the last two chapters, where he resorts to a hagiographical model by reserving the
penultimate chapter to recount Catarina’s burial and the last one for identifying
miracles that had been wrought through her intercession after death. As mentioned
earlier, although the formulas for evidence of sanctity included the working of
miracles, along with the demonstration of heroic virtue, the new seventeenth-century
norms established for canonization advised clerics to tread carefully in an area that
by that time had been reserved for papal interpretation. Graxeda is caught in a bind
of needing to provide evidence in order to promote his case but not wanting to over¬
step boundaries regarding the determination of the sacred. He falls back on his
methodological metadiscourse, promising to produce a succinct, truthful narrative
based on eyewitness testimony of Catarina’s virtue:

The one miracle that I will here report suffices to substantiate all the rest
because it was widely known to many people who witnessed it and who can
verify it. I will leave aside the other miracles because there are issues in them
that are very difficult to ascertain and are best left to the understanding of
those people in the church whose official ministry is in this area. I do not
wish stories of other miracles to be an obstacle to seeing the good reputation
and virtues in this servant of God, nor do I wish to prolong this story which
is intended only to awaken and incite devotion in the faithful.39

In one paragraph where he cites an example of Catarina’s portrait (before it was

banned, of course) aiding in the cure of a sick man, he warns the reader not to inter¬
pret the healing as the holy woman’s own work, but rather as God working through
her.40
In the author’s conclusion, Graxeda describes yet another dilemma he has had
to negotiate: to write a complete history of Catarina’s life, he must depend on other
eyewitness testimony, which he carefully weighs for reliability before including it in
his account.41 In discussing the trustworthiness of his sources and the authority of
his narrative, Graxeda echoes the prologue and at the same time confuses the nar¬
rative voice as he reveals in the process that an anonymous woman wrote the last
chapters using his own notes. Although readers today may interpret this assertion as
calling into question Graxeda’s narrative authority, his contemporaries, and in par¬
ticular church officials, must have read these statements as support for the account’s
reliability.42
 Catarina ie San Juan

Besides painstakingly elucidating his methodology, Graxeda develops a series

of stratagems to highlight his unrelenting commitment to historical truth. Like Ramos,
he had privileged access to the semicloistered woman in his role as her confessor.
But he also shows how, as a learned man, he understood the importance of accu¬
rately recording the language and dialect of people’s testimony. Curiously, Graxeda
never mentions the tact that he was a professor of the Totoneca language, but he
employs his expertise as a linguist to decipher and interpret before the reader’s eyes
Catarina’s halting Spanish. He transcribes it—grammatical errors and all—for the
reader to “hear.” He then “translates” and “interprets” her words by rewriting them,
making her speech grammatical, highly rhetorical, and often sermomc:

[Catarina] In truth my angel, y’worships tell the truth, and so beg God no
lose me.
[Graxeda] Which is to say: In truth, your worships tell the truth and sense
what I am, that I am a liar and yet for that reason I ask that for the love of
God you pray for me, that my soul may not be lost; indeed, I recognize
that I am a China [Asian] woman, indeed I see that I am rubbish, that I am
a piece of filth and a bitch dog, but for this same circumstance, because of
both what you believe and what you say, for this very reason I implore you
to make a special entreaty that I end well. (This was Catarina’s reply to
occasional passers-by who called her esta perra china embustera—“that lying
China bitch.”)43

A notable graphic characteristic of the first edition of the Compendia is that the
italics used for both the transcription and translation of Catarina’s speech dominate
nearly a third of the text (and such quotes are only ocassional in previous biographies
of Catarina). Graxeda thus creates a sense of historical truth—if only as narrative and
graphic verisimilitude—that piques the reader’s curiosity about the exotic nature of
the protagonist and simultaneously indoctrinates by rendering an “Inquisition-safe”
conventional Counter-Reformation model of female holiness.
In fact, Graxeda’s text reflects church attempts to establish control in several
areas. Besides tightening the definition of heresy, as we saw m Rosa’s case, the Council-
of Trent had also stiffened the requirements for sainthood in the spirit of rigor ad¬
vocated by humanist historians, which, among other things, dictated the need for
reliable witnesses and stylistic decorum befitting historical truth. The process began
in the thirteenth century when Pope Gregory IX attempted to identify with legalis¬
tic precision both saints and heretics. He established the first Inquisition and also
created more requirements for canonization. By the seventeenth century, canoniza¬
tion required witnesses, trials, judges, prosecutors, and defenders—all orchestrated
from Rome. As a result of the ever-increasing need to define, grade, and limit saint¬
hood, there were only six formal canonizations in the sixteenth century—with a sixty-
five-year hiatus between 1523 and 1588—and in the period from 1629 to 1658 there
were no canonizations whatsoever.44
Even as official sanctity was on the wane, the popular imitation of it was on the
rise. The canonization in 1622 of four Spanish saints inspired Spanish Americans for
the next century and a half; hundreds of people imitated these saints, while dozens
62 POTENTIAL SAINTS

of clergy wrote hagiographic-style vidas as supporting evidence sent to Rome to at¬

tempt to initiate the process for beatification. Just as Hansen’s Vida of Rosa had played
a crucial role in her canonization, Ramos’s and Graxeda’s texts were meant to help
beatify Catarina de San Juan, but only Graxeda circumscribes his material according
to the Vatican's rules, well aware that any definitive claims of miracles or evidence
of unapproved cults would count against Catarina’s candidacy for sainthood. He uses
a notion of decorum proper to the times, employing a style befitting Catarina’s pid¬
gin Spanish.45 Moreover, he has recourse to only reliable witnesses, explicitly defers
to papal authority, and always reins in the baroque tales of marvel. Graxeda’s text
successfully embodies the new historical discourse required by Rome to initiate the
beatification procedure.
A third factor comes mto play when examining Graxeda’s narrative strategies.
Given the restrictions placed on fiction in Spanish America, colonial authors fre¬
quently employed the rhetoric of historiography, but they created texts that are a
hybrid of literary and historical genres. Graxeda’s text, like that of his contemporary
Carlos de Sigtienza y Gongora’s popular chronicle of a shipwrecked man (Jjos injortunios
de Alonso Ramirez), is a series of rapid narrative sequences that read almost like an early
novel, except that they are framed by a painstaking exposition of how the author
came to find the historical record of the adventures and how each adventure illus¬
trates the exemplarity of Catarina's life. This structure clearly reflects Counter-
Reformation guidelines for literary production.
Authors were to observe rules set by the Council of Trent that governed almost
every aspect of practice of the Catholic faith, highlighting in particular the impor¬
tance of the spiritual world, salvation as the meaning of existence, and the church’s
role as mediator between God and his earthly subjects. This ideology was transmit¬
ted to the faithful through preaching, frequent confession, insistence on complete
obedience to church hierarchy, and control of religious practices, which included new
rules for religious orders and oratorical style, as well as guidelines for art and litera¬
ture. The goals underlying this program were to achieve religious homogeneity and
to maintain the political, economic, social, and religious status quo in a period of
increasingly rapid change.
The tenets that informed works by learned men like Ramos and Graxeda were
drawn from guidelines for doctrinal and devotional literature which emphasized that
moral instruction should teach (ensenar) and entertain through aesthetic appeal (deleitar)
in order to persuade by moving (mover) the reader or listener to salutary change. To
effect change, literature depended on appeal to the emotions rather than to the in¬
tellect. Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol explains how one of the most important theolo¬
gians of Counter-Reformation Spam, Fray Luis de Granada, details this approach in
his Ecclesiasticae rhetoricae (1567).46 Creating visual images in the reader’s mind, drama¬
tizing events, employing rhetorical devices to astound and provoke awe and linguis¬
tic experimention worked to effect a suspense of the ordinary state of understanding
(suspenso) and thus a state of mind in which the reader or listener might be more eas¬
ily persuaded to absorb the doctrines being preached. Granada warns, however, that
theatricality had to be tempered with a natural style (verisimilitude) in order to be
believable and, therefore, emulated. These guidelines for literary practice and indoc-
 Catarina de San Juan

trination clearly shape both Graxeda’s and Ramos’s authorial intentions, narrative
style, and content. Both biographies draw on highly charged, exotic material to strike
awe in readers and act as springboards for preaching. Graxeda’s creation of narrative
strategies to underline his adherence to the criteria of brevity and eyewitness testi¬
mony, however, saves his text from the hands of the Holy Office, while Ramos’s
abundant flourishes, theatricality, and lack of verisimilitude eventually caused his
works to be banned from bookshelves in both the Old and New Worlds.
Not surprisingly, the literary practices advocated by the Council of Trent are echoed
in the Inquisition’s rules regarding books. Within a decade of the close of Trent, the
first official tribunal of the Holy Office was established on American soil, and, as
mentioned earlier, promulgated edicts regarding the ownership of books. By the mid-
seventeenth century, the majority of autos-da-fe had already been staged, and the cen¬
sorship of books was now one of the most vital roles played by the Inquisition. A set
of fourteen rules—“Reglas, mandatos y advertencias generales del novissimus librorum
et expurgandorum”—drafted at the turn of the eighteenth century, illustrates the de¬
termining factors in a book’s fate when examined by the Inquisition.47 Depending on
a book’s perceived danger to the faith, it could be placed in one of the three categories
of censorship: complete prohibition, ownership by designated people such as priests,
or censorship of offending passages. Although not condemned on the gravest charge
as being heretical or containing witchcraft, Ramos’s text received the toughest sentence
possible for a book: complete prohibition from being owned or read. The type of cen¬
sorship depended not only on the gravity of the errors found in the material but also
on the frequency with which they appeared in the book.48
Assertions about Catarina’s holiness and visionary powers were so abundant and
extensive in Ramos’s three-volume work that the Holy Office could not merely cen¬
sor certain passages. As judged by the second round of calificadores, who lived in Spain
and had not known Catarina, De los prodigios commits errors outlined in several rules
as in rule 6, books that contain “things against holy doctrine” (cosas contra la buena y
santa doctrinal and rule 7, works that “endanger the good practices of the Holy Catholic
Church” (danosas a las buenas costumbres de la Iglesia Christiana'), citing love stories, among
other types of fiction.
Rule 8, which banned all types of portraits, medals, rings, and crosses bearing a
person’s image and to which are attributed effects worked only by God, also clarifies
why in 1691 the New Spanish Inquisition brought forth an edict prohibiting por¬
traits of Catarina de San Juan (see figure 2.2). The edict states that any images in
which Catarina de San Juan appears alone or next to Bishop Juan de Palafox y
Mendoza should be limited to private use, and it banned the lighting of candles around
them, thus reflecting Pope Urban VIII's restriction of such practices to beatified or
canonized holy people.49 The 1696 New Spanish edict ordering the closure of the
oratory dedicated to Catarina de San Juan further demonstrates the church’s desire
to control popular devotion. While Ramos’s record of frequent supernatural occur¬
rences and continual recourse to the technique of suspense (suspenso) may have led to
the Inquisition’s verdict that the text lacked verisimilitude and was nearly blasphe¬
mous, the fact that a cult was forming around the holy woman was surely a major
factor that could have tipped the judgment against Ramos.50
Figure 2.2 Portrait of Catharina de San Juan from Alonso Ramos De los prodigios
(Courtesy of Manuel Ramos Medina)
 Catarina de San Juan

Sanctity, Cults, and Church Politics

Why did New Spain lag behind Spain in censoring Ramos’s biography, only pro¬
hibiting it four years later, in the same year that the oratory was closed? In theory,
the New Spanish Holy Office had to observe all edicts promulgated in Spain about
censored books, and communication between the metropolis and the colony tended
to be efficient. Although our documentation about the debate that surely would have
surrounded the 1696 edict is limited,51 a letter written by Mexico’s inquisitor general
three years after the Spanish censorship of Ramos’s work asks the Spanish office
about the status of the text: many people have claimed that it had been prohibited,
but he had not been officially informed of its censorship.52 Certainly the head of the
Inquisition could not have been so completely in the dark about the verdict in Spain—
there must have been strong forces behind the delay. Quite probably, the simulta¬
neous prohibition of the oratory and biography came only under great pressure.
Perhaps the fact that the first prohibition comes from Spain, even as portraits of
Catarina are being confiscated in Puebla, points to the possibility that the case was
too hot to handle in New Spain. Although the church had to regulate popular cults
in order to maintain its authority, local ecclesiastics may have been reluctant to cen¬
sor the circulation of a book that they themselves had approved earlier, especially
one about a local heroine who was the spiritual daughter of the locally powerful Jesuits.
Her story exemplified the Jesuit mission to convert and assimilate peoples from Asia
into the Catholic faith.
Loath to lose a good candidate for sainthood, the Jesuits undoubtedly would
have been reluctant to abandon the case for Catarina de San Juan. Having a saint
associated with their order would have enhanced its power and prestige, and as one
of the more powerful orders in New Spain by the turn of the eighteenth century, the
Jesuits may have lobbied successfully for a time and warded off censorship. Beside
being powerful in New Spain, the Jesuits also championed the criollo cause, enhanc¬
ing a strong, independent identity for colonists under Spanish rule—a posture that
would lead to the whole order being expelled from Spanish America nearly a cen¬
tury later. The Inquisition’s prohibition of the two Jesuit-authored biographies
(Aguilera and Ramos) and the approval of the non-Jesuit Graxeda’s text may also
indicate a backlash against the order.
Jesuit records about Ramos’s sorry ending reveal how the order clearly attempted
to protect its image. Ramos was recalled to Puebla to resume his position as rector
of the order in 1693 after having moved to Mexico City three years earlier. By 1694,
records report a discussion about possibly removing Ramos from office because of
his “lack of moderation and excessive drinking” (destemplanza y exceso de bebef). By 1695,
however, another entry details a change in tactic: because news had arrived that the
prohibition of Ramos’s text was in the works, the Father General approved a deci¬
sion to keep Ramos on as rector for the time being in order to avoid fueling the
scandal that was sure to erupt upon the news of the censorship. Soon after, however,
Ramos was confined to a cell where he spent years, escaping once in 1698 with a
knife and nearly stabbing to death the man who replaced him as rector.53
66 POTENTIAL SAINTS

Repeated assertions of Catarina’s popularity among the townspeople of Puebla

and the censorship of her portraits and oratory suggest that devotion to her was hard
to stamp out.54 Another as yet unexplained phenomenon in Catarina’s case is why
her portrait was often circulated with that of Bishop Palafox, the bishop who pro¬
voked so much admiration that he was promoted for beatification and who also so
angered some Jesuit factions that he was recalled to Spain. On the one hand, we must
ask why a prodigy of the Jesuits would be promoted alongside a bishop who fought
for increased secularization of the clergy, thus diminishing the power of regular or¬
ders like the Jesuits. On the other hand, Palafox was already seen as a saintly man, so
that associating Catarina with him could only help promote her orthodoxy and ho¬
liness.55 Although many of the answers lie in uncovering more about the political
nuisances of the time, this may simply reflect that, despite Jesuit efforts to claim
Catarina as one of their own, her appeal, like Palafox’s, cut across all sections of society
and the church. In fact, in many ways, the framing of her story in both Jesuit biog¬
raphies is that she is first and foremost a symbol for Puebla. We have seen how Ramos
dedicates his third volume to Puebla and how Aguilera calls Catarina the mother
and teacher (“Madre y Maestra”) of Puebla. She is less a symbol for the Universal
Catholic Church, perhaps, and more a symbol for Puebla’s protagonism within that

Perhaps even more intriguing is the broader question of why the Jesuits and
Puebla itself would fervently promote a non-white, lay holy woman when she devi¬
ated from the model female saint promoted by the Counter-Reformation Church.
Perhaps it was these very deviations that allowed Catarina to be considered singular
enough to be worthy of veneration by local people. In fact, Catarina de San Juan’s
life story was a far cry from the typical biography of a Counter-Reformation saint.
As Peter Burke notes, the typology of a saint canonized between 1588 and 1767 re¬
flected a collective representation of people well-born, of white upper-class parents,
living in powerful countries (Italy and Spam dominate), and professed in important
religious orders, primarily the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits.56 Most saints
were founders of religious orders or missionaries, while a significant number were
ecclesiastic pastors, mystics, or people devoted to charitable works. The centraliza¬
tion and control of sanctity demanded that candidates conform to Rome’s defini¬
tion of holiness as judged by its examiners, which discouraged individualization and
local cults. In the prefatory pages to Ramos’s first volume, several licenses discuss
how local opinion of a person’s sanctity had been considered essential as a reliable
collective witness for a case, but unlike earlier cases such local support was now in¬
sufficient for establishing sainthood.
From what we have seen, Catarina may have had a strong local appeal not only
because she satisfied the popular taste for heroes who embodied the paradoxes of
the baroque~age~but alsmTJecTileThTeT'rirjfTiFie'dThrTacial and cultural mixture that
characterized New Spam. The edict about Catarina’s portrait~and biograpIiy~may~
have served as a warning to keep non-white populations in their place.57 The whole
question of Catarina’s race perhaps belongs to part of a much larger debate that had
been brewing and that would take a more concrete form in Mexico City in the 1720s.
From the beginning of the Spanish conquest and colonization of America, Catholic
 Catarina de San Juan 67

Church leaders had debated the spiritual capacity of indigenous peoples for taking
formal religious vows. Early Franciscans had begun to train indigenous men for the
priesthood, but soon the tide turned and in theory they were banned from the elite
ranks. Likewise, ideas about native women taking the veil as brides of Christ were
being discussed. As Kathryn Burns has shown, in Cuzco, from the earliest decades of
colonization elite indigenous women, daughters of caciques, were integrated into the
new administration and economic system by creating nunneries for them. But in New
Spain, native women were not allowed to take the veil as high-ranking nuns until the
Convent of Corpus Christi was founded in 1724.58 Even then, however, a debate raged
about the ability of indigenous women to observe religious vows, in particular the
vow of chastity. It is during this polemic that the story of the lay Iroquois woman,
Catherine Tekakwitha was first translated into Spanish and published in New Spain.59
When Aguilar holds up the beauty of Catarina’s wheat-colored (triguem) skin, he is
entering into this debate about race and its relationship to spiritual beauty and ca¬
pacity. Notably, however, all three biographies highlight the supposed white elite
origins of Catarina. Said to have been born blonde and white, Catarina prayed tcTbe
turned into a dark, ugly woman in order to keep her chastity. Thus in the eyes of the
Spanish church the all-important question of origins and “purity of blood,” so eare-
OTy~ examined by the’Inquisition,7TsettIe3~foFTTatanna^regen3 changed her race.
The backlash against Ramos’s biography could have comFTrom all these forces:
Catarina’s race, the role of the Jesuits in New Spain, and Counter-Reformation rules
for literature and sainthood.
Not a simple case of how one life or book was deemed saintly and one deemed
heterodox, the story of the representation of Catarina de San Juan’s life showcases
the issues involved in studies of colonial Mexico, the church, and women. Race, so¬
cial status, religious status, and the role of male patrons and life stories as mediated
by male biographers all need to be taken into consideration when studying women’s
history and literary works from this period. As we have seen, Catarina was construed
by Ramos and others as the essence of holiness, an important symbol of religious
identity for New Spanish citizens and ecclesiastics. It is her male biographer’s works
that are targeted by the Inquisition. Catarina de San Juan’s case, like that of Rosa de
Lima’s for Peru, demonstrates how the lives of holy women became important to
the definition of New Spanish society and, accordingly, were targets of mediation
and control by church hierarchy.
Catarina as a person gets lost in the shuffle of church politics and didactic ends.
Historical facts about religious women and writings by them often faded as official
discourse took over to create an ideal portrait—albeit, in this case, a hotly contested
one—that might serve the institutional church. The true face and voice of an Asian
Indian woman who ended her final days surrounded by revering townspeople and
clergy is impossible to recover completely; the facts are eclipsed first by an out-of¬
control confessor’s account that fictionalizes and eroticizes Catarina’s life story, and
then by a biographer who follows rules so closely that he turns her story into a para¬
digm of sanctity. Apparently, Catarina's opportunity for sainthood was lost in the
cross-fire of rules about holiness, hagiography, and blasphemy.60 And yet, as the let¬
ters, Inquisition edicts, and hagiographic biographies about Catarina de San Juan
68 POTENTIAL SAINTS

discussed issues such as blasphemy and inspirational prose, heresy and sanctity, the
role of the elite vis-a-vis the lower classes in the church, popular devotion and insti¬
tutional religion, historical truth and literary verisimilitude, we begin to glimpse more
fully the complexity of mid-colonial Mexican society and literature. Perhaps most
significantly, unlike Rosa, Catarina never learned to write and, therefore, we are unable
to hear her voice directly. Nonetheless, popular support for her was sufficient enough
that she lives on today in the popular legendary figure of the China Poblana. Statues
and portraits of her can be found in modern-day Puebla.

Chronology of Catarina de San Juan

ca. 1600 Born Mirrha in the Mogul empire of India,

ca. 1610 Captured by Portuguese slave traders.
1619 Converts to Christianity; baptized by the Jesuits in Manila,
ca. 1620 Arrives to New Spain, via the port of Acapulco, and is bought by a
couple from Puebla.
ca. 1625 Marries her master’s slave, Domingo,
ca. 1640 Becomes a free woman.
1688 Dies in Puebla, Mexico.
1689 Ramos publishes the first volume of his biography of Catarina, De los
prodigios.
1690 Ramos publishes the second volume.
1692 Ramos publishes the third and final volume.
1692 The Spanish Inquisition bans the first and second volumes of De los
Prodigios.
1692 Castillo de Graxeda publishes his Compendio of Catarina’s life.
1696 The Mexican Inquisition bans De los Prodigios.
 The Mystic Nun
Madre Maria de San Jose (l6j6—iyigj

Confession and Autohagiography

“How I longed to be a saint!”

—Marfa de San Jose, Vida, vol. 3

“Your path is very similar to Saint Teresa’s.”

—God speaking to Marfa de San Jose, Vida, vol. 1

“I have seen these papers. . . . God is apparent in this creature. Hurry her up and
ask her to write the rest of what happened to her.”
—Letter from Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz to Marfa’s confessor, in
Santander y Torres, Vida

A s Rosa’s canonization process was being renewed in Rome and Catarina de San
Juan was leading a life as a visionary in Puebla, half a day’s journey away in New
Spain, a girl experienced a vision that changed her life. Juana Palacios Berruecos re¬
calls in her autobiographical vida that a vision of the devil, followed by one of the
Virgin Mary, led to her decision to follow a religious vocation. Living on a rural
hacienda on the outskirts of Tepeaca, she began an extreme ascetic practice and later
was associated with the Franciscans as a lay heata. But unlike Rosa, who refused to
enter the convent, Juana sought the safety of the cloister and the vow of perpetual
enclosure. In fact, she struggled for more than two decades to achieve her wish,
often encountering family conflict over her decision. At the age of thirty-one, Juana
finally entered the Augustinian Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla, Mexico, and
rejoiced at becoming “dead to the world.” After professing final vows and changing
her name to Marfa de San Jose, she could no longer leave the walls of the convent or
see family and friends without an iron grate between them and a chaperone present.
Beginning with these early years on the hacienda and continuing throughout more
than three decades of convent life, Marfa strove to be saintlike with all her heart: she
exclaims in her confessional journals, “Flow I longed to be a saint!” (vol. 3).
Significantly, when Marfa de San Jose wrote years later from the point of view
of a high-ranking nun about her twenty years of living on the hacienda as a lay reli-

69
70 POTENTIAL SAINTS

gious woman, she omitted the fact that she had worn the third-order Franciscan habit
(vol. i). Only in her final years would she mention this, and then only once (vol. n).
Moreover, while she had followed an ascetic practice that was closely related to the
medieval models established by Catherine of Siena and imitated by Rosa de Lima,
Marfa never mentions either saint’s names in her more than twelve volumes of writ¬
ing. And yet, she borrows almost verbatim details from Hansen’s life of Rosa in order
to describe her own fasting, retirement to a garden hut for prayer and mortification,
secret pacts with Indians who helped her with penitential practices, and mystic mar¬
riage to Christ. Marfa cites instead works by or about the Spanish ascetic Peter of
Alcantara, the popular medieval Italian hermit Anthony of Padua, St. Francis’s Rule
for the Clarist nuns, and several spiritual exercise books. Perhaps more telling than
the list of influences on her secular life are the mentions of models she used once she
took the veil (and as she began to write). The authors that figure most prominently
are Teresa of Avila; the founder of Marfa de San Jose’s order, the Augustian Recol¬
lects, Mariana de San Joseph; and, a distant third, another Spanish nun and devo¬
tional author, Marfa de la Antigua. Not surprisingly, once Marfa was in the convent
and a writer herself most of Marfa’s models were other nuns who had authored texts
that supported Counter-Reformation teachings about the enclosure of religious
women and the careful ecclesial monitoring of the spiritual life.
Marfa was not the only cautious writer, however. The same Dominican friar,
Sebastian de Santander y Torres, who inaugurated the Puebla convent dedicated
to Rosa with a warning to its members about the dangers of being a lay holy woman,
also wrote the official biography of Marfa de San Jose. He frequently compares
Marfa to Rosa—their fast, charity, humility, visions of the host, and prophecies
of convent foundings.1 But he never mentions that both women spent formative
years as Franciscan lay holy women. On the one hand, as a Dominican, he surely
wanted to claim Rosa for his own order and focused on her later association with
them; on the other hand, no doubt he was wary of religious women living outside
the convent. Like Hansen before him, Santander y Torres responds to a superior’s
request (that of the bishop of Oaxaca) for a hagiographical-style biography in order
to inspire readers and possibly begin a canonization inquiry. In his prologue, Santander
y Torres inscribes Marfa de San Jose’s life story into church convention for holy
women and ardently proclaims her as having a “virile heart” (corazon varonil) worthy
of Christ and his saints.
The writings of both Marfa and Santander y Torres reveal the continuity of the
tradition of hagiography and the centrality of imitation both to the establishment of
an individual’s spiritual path and to the textual representation of that life journey in
confessional autobiographical accounts and didactic biographies written to inspire
further emulation. Marfa’s life also reveals that the ambiguity and threat of a vision¬
ary woman living outside the convent had not changed since Rosa’s time; indeed,
vigilance had become more stringent. Many of the concerns about sanctity and her¬
esy found in the biographical stories of Rosa and Catarina de San Juan marked the
daily lives and confessional accounts of devout girls and women who wished to fol¬
low the way of the saints. Questions about doctrinal purity, prayer, and the nature
of visionary activity, as well as concerns about how to represent these in oral and
 Marta de San Jose 71

written accounts for spiritual directors, became central to many colonial religious
women’s lives. Maria de San Jose, in particular, divulges the interior life of
a woman who desperately sought to meet institutional church expectations. For at
least twenty-five years she documented her spiritual life for God and her confessors
(ca. 1691—1717). The resulting two-thousand-page manuscript journal clearly illus¬
trates how she eagerly, and at times painfully, sought to follow the model of heroic
virtue.2 (See figure 3.1.) Although it was strongly promoted by two bishops, Marfa
de San Jose’s case never made it to Rome for formal consideration by the Congrega¬
tion of Holy Rites. Her cloistered status perhaps accounts for the fact that her vi¬
sionary writings and hagiographic biography also never fell into the hands of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition. Instead, after being used as a primary source for her
biography and the popular eighteenth-century publication of her guide to the Sta¬
tions of the Cross, the journals were returned to the Augustiman convent in Oaxaca
where she had died.
Once returned to the convent archives, Marfa’s journals remained there until
the convent was closed in the nineteenth century.3 Considered lost by at least one
twentieth-century historian,4 the autograph manuscript is now housed in a collec¬
tion of colonial documents in the United States. Since my serendipitous find of the

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Figure 3.1 Opening pages from Frfa, by Maria de San Jose, vol. 1, ca. 1703 (Courtesy
of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island)
72 POTENTIAL SAINTS

manuscript in 1984, we are now able to see the extent to which male biographers
altered nuns’ words "when they quoted them. We also see the extent to which
twentieth-century critics have mTsreacT tKesFqubtesR As I will show in this chapter,
Maria de San Jose’s extensive autobiographical text provides us with a unique op¬
portunity to study the role of religious women in America.
In many ways, Maria’s life and life writings as a religious woman are both
unique and paradigmatic. She is the only woman considered in this book who spent
as many years outside the convent as in it (about thirty-two years), and thus she
offers the dual perspective of a beata and a nun. Also, she is the only nun studied
who professed her vows in a reformed order, like St. Teresa’s. In addition, the
contemporary textual corpus by and about Maria de San Jose is the most exten¬
sive we have to date for any colonial Latin American woman. We have samples of
all the most popular period biographical and autobiographical religious narrative
genres for one individual: a funerary sermon, a hagiographic biography, and a tract
proposing canonization, as well as a formal confessional vida, a series of cuentas de
conciencia, and a first-person devotional guide and chronicle of convent founding.6
These documents provide an unusual opportunity to compare biographical and
autobiographical representation, and to reconstruct the narrative models and pur¬
poses for each. Because Marfa de San Jose earnestly sought the way of the saints in
her daily routine and writing, her manuscript also offers a certain transparency for
seeing how church rules and texts informed her identity. Her journals illustrate a
process that has been called “autohagiography” by several scholars.7 The church’s
rescripting of her journals for an official biography and prayerbook further illus¬
trate the complex mtertextuality between confessional and hagiographic writings
for church ends.

Portrait of a Mystic Nun

Marfa de San Jose’s life story is best understood as part of a flourishing spiritual and
religious movement in seventeenth-century New Spain. In the two major religious
centers, Mexico City and Puebla de los Angeles, people were founding dozens of
religious institutions and devoting their lives to the church. Puebla, the site of Marfa’s
first convent, boasted wealth and a large number of criollos among its inhabitants,
as well as two successive bishops, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza and Manuel Fernandez
de Santa Cruz, who promoted Puebla as a religious center in the New World. By the
time Marfa took the veil in 1687, the city maintained the largest number of convents
per capita and published the largest number of biographical vidas of its local holy
people in the Americas.8 In a search for their own saint, even after the fiasco of
Ramos’s biography of Catarina de San Juan, Poblanos wrote, published, and sent to
Rome dozens of hagiographical biographies. Sisters who had preceded Marfa in Puebla
in the first half of the seventeenth century had gained popular and institutional sup¬
port for their holiness. (M^ana herself cites two of them, Isabel de la Encarnacion
and Maria de Jesus, in her journals.)9 Bishop Santa Cruz, in particular, fervently
promoted several of these women. But he was also instrumental in blocking Marfa’s
first attempts to enter the convent, and only later promoted her role as a mystic writer
 Mans ^ San Jose 73

and convent founder.10 Impressed by her visionary life once she was a nun, he in fact
initiated her writing career, asking for a written record of her life story (ca. 1691,
f

bound in vol. 12).

ePa-

In a revised account of this formal vida (vol. 1), written at least a dozen years
later (ca. 1703) for a new confessor, Fray Placido de Olmedo, Maria states she was
born in 1656 on a hacienda de labor, a rural agricultural plantation, located about seven
leagues from Puebla and a half-league from the important but small Indian town of
Nar Mad,

Tepeaca.11 Born to a criollo couple from Puebla, the rather well-to-do Luis Palacios
y Solorzano and Antonia Berruecos Lopez, Maria was one of eight daughters and a
son, and the sixth daughter in line for a dowry, which was often necessary for mar¬
riage or entrance into the convent. The couple had moved from Puebla to the haci¬
enda in order to manage it and raise a family. Unfortunately, luck had not been with
them, and large debts were owed on the properties by the time Luis died in 1667.
Following a pattern typical of many lives of the saints, Maria reports that soon
after her father’s death, when she was only ten or eleven, she experienced a sudden,
dramatic conversion to the spiritual life. As discussed in the introduction to this
volume, Maria had participated in family routine by sewing with her mother and
sisters, listening to her father and brother read the lives of saints, and playing with
sisters and neighboring girls during free time. One day, however, while playing at
grinding flour with her friends and swearing at one of them, Maria saw a bolt of
lightning strike a wall, which then tumbled and killed a horse. After running into the
loki^k toa-p

house, she saw a vision of the devil as a nude mulatto man who said, “You are mine.
You will not escape my clutches.”12 A subsequent vision of the Virgin Mary offer¬
ing to wed the girl in mystic marriage to Christ convinced Maria to take the vows of
a bride of Christ: obedience, chastity, and poverty. From that moment forward, Maria
established an ascetic life—imitating the saints and closely following spiritual exer¬
cise books and the Rule for Saint Clare. Although her family frequently reined in
her practices, Maria describes a rigorous schedule of prayer, fasting, and labor that
was supplemented by sessions of mortification, which included wearing shirts made
of animal hair and filled with lice, as well as refraining from unnecessary contact
'"'\with anyone. Like Catherine of Siena and Rosa de Lima before her, Maria built a
hut in the backyard and spent hours there every day in prayer and spiritual practices.
In addition, she informally associated with the Franciscans, who occasionally passed
through the area, offered periodic guidance, and stayed with the family. For two
decades, Maria followed the path of a lay beata, yet she longed to live in an urban
center with access to a confessor, daily mass, and convents. Maria blamed the long
delay in becoming a nun on the isolation of the rural hacienda and the family’s fi¬
nancial straits and conflicts.
Much of this description echoes conventions for the trials of the spiritual path,
and yet Maria’s account provides striking details about the conflicts that her voca¬
tion caused. She describes the painful effects of the often contradictory messages
society gave to young girls. Extreme fasting, mortification, and dedication to God
were highly exalted practices, but they also created grave concerns within many fami¬
lies. A young woman like Maria, who spent hours alone in the garden and also had
an Indian servant help her perform penitential practices, such as flagellation, in se-
cret, could be suspected by church or society as being dishonorable and feigning
holiness (falsa beata). Plain old sibling affection and jealousy also played an important
part: while one sister feared losing Maria to perpetual enclosure, another competed
with her for a dowry. The hefty two- to four-thousand peso dowry required for
.entrance into a convent became an obstacle for Maria and her two other sisters who
wanted to become nuns. With the at-times reluctant charity of Bishop Santa Cruz
and another patron, however, all three girls finally achieved positions as nuns, but
only after a number of false starts. Because of the family’s good social standing and
the fact that marriage dowries could often consist of the inheritance of property,
three other sisters married into prominent local families.13
This family dynamic wreaked havoc on Maria’s good intentions and health; she
blamed familial tension and severe penitential practices for a five-year illness that
began within several years of her conversion. At first diagnosed as a bad heart (mal de
corazon), after several life-threatening treatments, doctors concluded it was not a natural
sickness but one sent by God. The illness left Maria an invalid, alternately experi¬
encing fits of uncontrollable movement and near paralysis. Her sisters had to feed
and dress her. Maria reports that she was cured only after the departure of the most
troublesome sister for the convent (Francisca, ca. 1675) and with the miraculous in¬
tercession of Maria’s favorite saint, Anthony of Padua. Once she was about eighteen
and of age to take the veil, Maria returned to her rigorous practices but also began a
series of attempts to enter the convent. Years later, in 1687, Maria’s Dominican
brother-in-law Fray Gorospe (one of the same friars who had helped Catarina de
San Juan) interceded on her behalf and encouraged Bishop Santa Cruz to grant Maria
a place in the newly established convent reserved for women who were “virtuous,
poor, and entirely Spanish, with no mulatto, mestiza, or any other mixture of race.”14
Entrance into the Convent of Santa Monica did not bring release from conflict,
however. Maria’s first four years were filled with self-doubt, illness, inability to talk
with her confessor, torments by the devil, and reprimands from the convent sisters.
Reporting in volume 2, she describes the trials. Upon entrance into the walled-off
cloister, Maria lived with about twenty-five nuns and as many servants and slaves.
After years of living as a lay beata, largely following her own schedule, she now had to
eat at designated times, pray the divine office regularly throughout the day, perform
duties assigned by the abbess, and carry out all tasks with complete obedience to
superiors. As a novice, Maria was subjected to extra tests of perseverance and obedi¬
ence. Upon taking final vows a year later, she agreed to dedicate her life to praying
for the Christian community and to observe the four vows required of all nuns.
Following the Carmelite order’s reformed rule established a century earlier by Teresa
of Avila for her nuns, the Augustinian Recollects of Marfa de San Jose”s order strictly
observed the vows of perpetual enclosure, complete obedience to their superiors,
poverty (not owning anything for themselves), and celibacy. From the day of her
profession of vows forward, she lived a communal life, having only a small individual
cell with a sleeping mat, stool, table, and crucifix to retire to for her nightly rest.
Having her own private space was something that had been hard to come by on the
busy hacienda, and she exclaims several times in volume 2, “my cell seemed like a
little bit of heaven.” Yet, perhaps because of the relative freedom she had enjoyed
 Maria de San Jose 75

on the hacienda, a much more regimented and communal life of duties proved hard
at first. Later in the same volume, Maria reports that the prioress whipped her for
not wearing her habit correctly and for arriving late to the Divine Office; the con¬
vent sisters taunted her about her extreme mortification practices; doctors treated
her with more than a dozen blood-lettings (sangrias) for bad humors, boils on her
feet, and hives; and three demons reportedly tormented Marfa:

The first of the three demons had a very narrow waist that nipped in at the
middle of his body, in the form of a very fierce animal: none other than a
black dog. It was very common to see this one, and I always saw him with
this shape and form. When he became most enraged was when he tried by
some temptation to make me fall into hell, for they only tormented me
regarding my faith. By this one temptation alone, I have never been afflicted;
I have been greatly pressed by the others, by all other temptations that ever
existed. Well, as I was saying, when they wanted to make me fall into some
temptation they became fiercely enraged, especially this one with the waist
nipped in that I always saw with the face and shape of a black dog. I would
see him, just like a dog when it wants to bite, and it opens its mouth all
furious and shows its teeth. I saw him exactly like that, for he would raise
his head as if he meant to bite me. And then he would do it; he would sink
his teeth into my flesh so that I had to cry out. Yet I never did, helped and
aided by the strength of the Lord and by holy obedience, so that I scarcely
uttered a single word or made even the slightest gesture whatsoever to in¬
dicate anything of what was happening, when I had the Mother Superior
hanging over me. For she would hush me by whipping me with a belt, and
if she could not do so in person she would send another nun to do it.15

At one point, Marfa even describes, through the voice of the devil, thoughts of suicide.
These same years, however, were also filled with vivid and consoling visions of
God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints and souls. Moments of prayer and
the taking of the sacrament of communion frequently turned into specific visions
that often reassured Marfa that she was on a path to God or that expounded some
doctrinal point. For example, in her new job as wardrobe keeper, she described see¬
ing (as she sewed) an inner vision of a bed of flowers with Christ in the middle. In
another vision, she was embraced by Christ:

One day when I was at my prayers I saw Our Lord crucified, quite close to
me, and I saw how Fie took out the nails, lowering Himself from the cross,
and then came towards me. The cross stayed standing upright and He came
to where I was, and He entered inside me and embraced my soul with a
very fond and close embrace, and He said to me, “You see, this is the em¬
brace of a husband and of a father, to strengthen you and comfort you so
that you can sustain the trials that await you.16

In yet another mystical experience her heart became so engorged with love for God
(,ensanchamiento) that the nun in the infirmary later testified that two of Marfa’s ribs
were raised higher than the rest:
j6 POTENTIAL SAINTS

One day while I was feeling this fire of love which inflamed my breast, and
my heart did not fit in it, and lacking breath and bodily strength to endure
such a blaze, I prayed to His Majesty to douse the flame of His love a little,
because I was lacking life itself. And in this, I felt someone come to me and
they raised up two ribs right over my heart and stretched my chest larger so
that my heart could fit inside it. And with this my heart was eased and re¬
leased, and those two ribs remained raised up four fingers higher than the
rest. I saw and felt this, seeing the two hands. And what I say here, that my
two ribs remained higher, I saw with the eyes of my body after seeing all
of this with interior vision; and they stayed that way, higher than the rest.17

Time and again Marfa records how God even told her that she was a beautiful bride
for him. After four years of difficulty confessing, Marfa finally began to reveal this
visionary activity to her confessor, the convent chaplain Manuel de Barros. He re¬
ported it to Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz, who, in turn, gave the order that Marfa
record the visions and events leading up to them: “I have seen these papers. . . . God
is apparent in this creature. Hurry her up and ask her to write the rest of what hap¬
pened to her.”18 The year was 1691 or 1692.
Five years later, Marfa had made her mark as a model nun. Bishop Santa Cruz
chose her to be one of five founders of the Convent of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad
in Oaxaca. In addition, she was to be the instructor of novices—training future nuns
for the convent—a post she would keep until her death more than twenty years later.
As Marfa describes in volumes 4 and 10, after the long journey to Oaxaca and the
first days of setting up the convent, she again encountered a myriad of difficulties.
The tension between town members and the new convent was high. The nuns were
accused first of sending the beloved statue and patron of the city, Nuestra Senora de
la Soledad, to Puebla and then of giving convent dowries designated for local Oaxacan
women to women from Puebla. The latter conflict lasted for years and reached such
a pitch that the city council, the bishop, and even the viceroy were consulted in an
attempt to settle the dispute.19 Marfa’s account demonstrates the keen rivalry be¬
tween Puebla and smaller provinces regarding their religious institutions and mon¬
ies. In addition to describing external challenges, she narrates recurring bouts of illness,
vivid temptations by the devil, problems with novices, and dismissals by confessors
who got fed up with her demanding visionary life.
In spite of these struggles (or perhaps as part of the process), the nun’s spiritual
path progressed from the intense individual visions (generally corporeal and imagi¬
nary) that characterized her life at Santa Monica to a more world-serving stage (in¬
tellectual or umtive).20 Later volumes record visionary activity that sped Marfa along
the spiritual path, but also describe more powers of prophecy and intercession. She
interceded before God on behalf of everyone from Pope Clement XI (during a con¬
troversy in Rome, vol. 11); to Bishop Maldonado (the conflict over his proposed
election as archbishop, vol. 11); to her birth family and religious family (usually for
their souls); to whole towns, such as Puebla (she sees them “without heads” in 1708
because of current controversy, vol. 7), Oaxaca (during earthquakes, droughts, and
floods, vol. 6), and San Lorenzo (a town with many people of African descent and
 Maria de San Jose 77

who she says were lax in their practice of Christianity, vol. 11). Marfa de San Jose
portrays herself as an "enclosed missionary’’ who worked closely with God:

Here I began to speak with God and to show Him my distress and to ask
His mercy, not only for me but for everyone. . . . While I was in this, I felt
the Lord draw near to me, and with that my fears and frights grew calm.
Here I heard His Majesty speaking to me, and among various things He
told me . . . that the city of Puebla was in very great travail, because in it
many sins were being committed. And to avoid these offenses and so that
those souls should not be lost, He was letting fall the lash of His justice;
yet not like a severe judge, but rather like a father, for He was sending that
city the thorns of many tribulations and griefs, so that by those same blows
they might be made to understand and might return to the Lord contrite
and sorrowing, praying to Him for mercy so as to offend Him no more.
That was what His Majesty told me, without letting me know a single thing
more; and when I asked Him, “Lord, and what can I do in matters of such
weight, that are told to my lowliness and wretchedness?” He answered me,
“Pray to Me for that city.”21

By following the way of the cross, the imitatio christi, and the mystic’s path, Marfa de San
Jose' became a powerful intercessor, recognized by clergy and the local community.
After a half-century of living a life devoted to God, Marfa died March 19, 1719,
having fought high fevers and chills for three months. Upon her death, as her biogra¬
pher reports in hagiographic tradition, Marfa’s face glowed once again with youth and
her body gave off a sweet aroma. All the highest-ranking Oaxaca church officials and
elite reportedly attended her funerary service, as guards fought off the crowds of people
who wanted to enter the church and take a bit of her tunic as a relic. They already saw
her as possessing saintly qualities and powers. First, Santander y Torres’s panegyric
sermon (1719) and then two editions of his hagiographic biography (1723, 1725) docu¬
mented Marfa’s model behavior. These were soon followed by Bishop Maldonado’s
tract proposing her canonization (ca. 1726). In these same years, Marfa became a pub¬
lished devotional author in her own right with the first two editions of her Stations of the
Cross (1723), a work that would be republished at least three more times in the eigh¬
teenth century. Apparently, however, Marfa de San Jose’s case was too weak to even
have been recorded at the Vatican. Indeed, only a handful of New Spanish candidates
did enter into the long, costly process of canonization. Of these, only two reached the
stage of beatification and none were canonized during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.22 Although she never achieved the highest institutional distinction within the
Catholic Church, Marfa de San Jose' played an important role in the development and
promotion of the institutional church in central New Spain. \q

tO(5T Ce>MS+- rMW

The Mystic Path, Discernment, and Authority ^

Apparently, Marfa de San Jose”s contemporaries were unanimous in believing that

they had witnessed the life of an individual chosen to enjoy mystic union with God
and whose life had been beneficial to the community. The preliminary pages to Marfa’s
 78 POTENTIAL SAINTS

"•N

biography written by Santander y Torres, much like those in Ramos’s life of Catarina
de San Juan, published the judgments passed on her life. In an attempt to distin¬
guish alumbradismo and religious fakery from mysticism, high-ranking church authorities
<r~>
examined the nature of Marfa de San Jose’s spiritual life and writings and deemed
L. them not only orthodox but worthy of emulation. Needing to cite how they came to
X> their conclusions, the calijicador for the Inquisition, the canon of the cathedral, a
Dominican (the biographer’s brother) who had heard Marfa’s confessions, and the
author himself all address the issues that needed to be taken into consideration when
judging a visionary’s life. In addition, the preliminary material includes three letters
confirming the worth of Marfa’s writings, including the one from Bishop Santa Cruz.
Perhaps it is the Holy Office’s Parecer that best reveals the church’s meticulous
process of evaluation of a person’s spiritual life. The calificador Luis de la Pena clears
Marfa on three grounds: (1) her visions were numerous and based on a life of virtue;

1 (2) the type of material found in the visions followed the rules of not introducing new
doctrine or contradicting previous visionaries and Scripture; and (3) Marfa herself was
healthy, silent, virtuous, and not rich, revealing an equanimous person not prone to
false visions. In his discussion of each of these areas for examination, references to

X previous models were essential. Key guidebooks about the visionary life and its dis¬
cernment included those by St. Francis of Sales, Martin Delrio, and Raphael de la Torre.

i Women mystics to emulate included the medieval saints Brigit, Catherine of Siena,
Gertrud, and Hildegard, as well as the Spanish beata Juana de la Cruz. The license of
approval by the cathedral’s canon adds to the list: Saints Isabel, Clare, Magdalene
of Pazzis, and Teresa, as well as two of Puebla’s own, Isabel de la Encarnacion
and Marfa de Jesus Tomelfn. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the calijicador
warns against false visionaries, such as Magdalena de la Cruz (in Cordoba) and
Marfa de la Anunciacion (in Portugal), as well as several unnamed women in Peru
and Mexico. All licenses conclude that Marfa de San Jose followed in the footsteps of
sainted mystic women, although one admits to the unusual character of Marfa’s writ¬
ings—nonetheless, even he approved the biography on the basis of the heroic virtue
that Marfa demonstrated in the general confession of her life in volume 1.
Santander y Torres’s prologue further assures readers that Marfa’s visionary life
is distinct from the heretical alumbrados; hers was a “virile heart” jorazon varonil) wor¬
thy of Christ, who safely guided her through a spiritual path full of snares. First and
foremost, Santander y Torres states that Marfa avoided heresy by frequent confes¬
sion and consultations with Christ’s mediators on earth, her confessors. Second, she
was a shining example of heroic virtue, especially the three fundamental theological
virtues of faith, hope, and charity. In addition to these, he argues, she had achieved
the rare final stage of mystic union, of experiencing moments of complete similitude
with God. Just as the Inquisition and later the Congregation of Holy Rites had judged
Rosa de Lima to have experienced this rare mystical process of union, New Spanish
clergy were now coming to a similar conclusion about Marfa de San Jose. Whereas
in Rosa’s case the church based most of their information on testimony taken about
Rosa’s life, in Marfa’s case church officials came to their conclusions through a care¬
ful examination of Marfa’s writings. Her mystic passages provoked both concern and
awe. Marfa’s eagerness to partake in the confessional process cleared her of a pos-
 Maria de San Jose 79

sible charge of heterodoxy, and her journals were essential later, when the church
promoted her as a model of heroic virtue.
As Maria began to set her life story to paper, she was deeply aware of the exten¬
sive process of spiritual discernment and the potential of being cast as a saint or a
sinner because of her visions. Her seemingly colloquial—at times, untrained—style,
often misunderstood by readers today as spontaneous and unlettered, disguises an
encoding of nearly every aspect of her recorded experience. At the heart of Marla’s
journals—and especially of those reflecting more formal genres like the vida and sta¬
tions—lies a carefully constructed narrative embedded with passages that echo the
rules for confession and holiness. Volume 1, Marla’s most formal confessional life
story, provides the key for understanding this process, as the Inquisition’s censor had
noted. Although Marla de San Jose followed conventions in stating that God is the
“true Book” and that his teachings in her life almost eliminated the need for books
to learn the spiritual path, she frequently incorporated passages from devotional texts
and sermons into her notebooks.
Hagiography and spiritual guidebooks served as a lens through which Marla
recalled her life and narrated her textual vida. The precept of the imitatio Christi and
the imitation of the lives of saints that had first informed her daily spiritual practice
later influenced the written representation of her life. Marla inscribed already can¬
onized stories and rules into her narrative. Perhaps viewed as plagiaristic from a
present-day perspective, in Marla’s time the process of incorporating other texts into
one’s own was part of finding one’s place among the community of saints. Integral
to the confessional process, life writing and imitation helped transform the self be¬
fore God, just as did the living imitation of Christ’s earthly sufferings. Marla’s story
unfolds within the conventional hagiographic structure of a Christian upbringing, a
fall from grace, a conversion experience, a new vocation from God, and the trials of
following God’s will, while also receiving divine mercies and grace. For women, in
particular, this confessional account in a hagiographic narrative structure needed to
include statements of humility, obedience, and ignorance—all in keeping with church
teachings about the limits on women’s attainment of knowledge.
In addition to following standard narrative structure and rhetoric, Marla de San
Jose carefully includes phrases from other texts and more general echoes from au¬
thors in the mystic tradition, scriptural and liturgical texts, and devotional works. A
dictum on virtuous silence and poverty (“do not speak with anyone .. . and do not
take or give anything—even though small and insignificant”), for example, appears
both in Marla’s account and in a sermon delivered at the Convent of Santa Monica
by Joseph Montero (of course, he may not be the original source for it but may have
borrowed from elsewhere). And Marla explicitly mentions the teachings of Bernard
of Clairvaux (his rules for novices, vol. 6) and John of the Cross (his advice not
to will a vision, vol. 7). Besides these brief references, Marla included information
about her spiritual practice from a wide range of spiritual exercise guides (in par¬
ticular, the one attributed to Peter of Alcantara), Franciscan hagiographies (Sts. Clare
and Anthony of Padua), the Augustinian Rule, and, especially, the writings by other
mystic nuns. She refers to her Spanish Convent sisters—Teresa, Marla de la Antigua,
and Mariana de San Joseph—at least five times each and also mentions the vida of
80 POTENTIAL SAINTS

another Augustinian Recollect sister, Juana de San Agustin. These nuns provided
powerful examples—and justifications—for Maria’s own spiritual progress and
writings. For instance, in a vision of a sympathetic Teresa, the saint promises to watch
over Maria’s notebooks (vol. 7). Choice phrases from Teresa’s writings about spiri¬
tual practices, experiences, and confessors are also woven through the fabric of Maria’s
narrative. Maria repeats a popular Teresian dictum, “suffering or death” (padecer 0
morir), more than twenty times and also discusses such Teresian topics as the “prayer
of quiet and union” (vol. 2). In fact, Maria’s first volume opens with whole phrases
from Teresa’s own opening chapter to her spiritual autobiography.
As she wrote her Vida, Maria draws most heavily, however, on the life narrative
of the order’s founder, Mariana de San Joseph, who in turn notes having read and
imitated Catherine of Siena, Rosa de Lima, and Teresa of Avila.23 Maria interpo¬
lates whole sentences and paragraphs nearly verbatim from the founder’s Vida.24
Whether Maria did so at her confessor’s prompting, as part of her own efforts to
inscribe her story into that of her order, or because of her lack of training in writing,
she imitates her model without alerting her reader. Those familiar with period devo¬
tional literature and its conventions would have heard distinct echoes, as the author
no doubt intended. The long, borrowed passages tend to sound more rhetorical or
homiletic than Maria’s otherwise more colloquial style, but some descriptions of her
immediate situation and emotional responses are less easily discemable as borrow¬
ings. For example, Maria signals the formal opening of the Vida by copying the first
page of the founder’s story:

My Lord and God, it is not the least of the mercies that You grant me now
and have granted me before in accepting this confession of mine, which
gives a written account of my entire life and of the mercies You have granted
me; so that if he so wishes, the one who commands me may know and have
a record of the ingratitude and wretchedness with which I have responded
in the course of my life to the benefits I have received from Your most
liberal hands, unworthy as I am of a single one.25

The passage emphasizes the author’s chosen status: although she is a miserable sin¬
ner, God wishes to use his favors in her life as an example for all to see. The formu¬
laic story about her Christian family and upbringing, about ten pages long, also relies
heavily on the model account. The Mexican nun borrows Mariana’s idealized de¬
scription of a long-suffering, devout Christian mother:

Although she was just a girl, her dresses were those of a woman of many
years, so that it could be seen that she had great virtue, and that persons
without it should not speak to her, nor would she permit conversations that
were not of that kind; and in all things she showed her great understand¬
ing. She was very devoted to Our Lady and fond of taking the Holy Sacra¬
ments very often. For the rest of her life, she went through many very great
trials and illnesses.26

In addition, Marfa uses the founder’s words for potentially controversial asser¬
tions, which suggests that the model text may have made self-expression safer from
 Maria de San Jose 81

criticism. Employing the founder’s words, Maria comments on the lack of good
confessors ( I had no confessor . . . with whom to unburden my heart,”) and her
first deep spiritual transformation (“a great window had opened in my soul, and
through it came a very bright light,”).27 These were recurring themes in the genre by
the turn of the eighteenth century. More unusual, however, is the use of the founder’s
text to describe Maria’s own sister, Francisca: “The two of us had very different
natures, and hers was very good indeed. Idler disposition was severe, and withdrawn,
and somewhat melancholic. Because of this they thought her rude and disagreeable
. . . the Lord permitted her to be harsh with me, to my great good.”28 Maria’s anxi¬
ety in recounting the ’bloody war” she had with Francisca may explain her borrow¬
ing: the saintly Mariana de San Joseph before her had encountered a similar conflict
of personalities and seen it as God’s will to test her.
To further position her Vida within accepted church texts and authority, Maria
insists on the role of clergy and the divine in the construction of her account. The
opening pages of volume i recall the history of her writing career, which includes an
impressive list of Puebla’s most talented churchmen who ordered the accounts, read
them, and officially registered them.29 While informative, the passage also is a pre¬
emptive move: it establishes the authority of previous accounts and, by extension,
the current one. Like her mystic counterparts, Maria also added to this list of au¬
thorities God himself:

The Bishop told me I should obey at once, without the slightest hesitation,
by beginning to write; that even though I could not write, nor had I been able
to learn how in spite of all the efforts I had made, obedience could work
miracles. Besides this, I knew it pleased Our Lord to make manifest the great
deeds that His powerful hand had worked in this lowly and wretched crea¬
ture that I have been; because in one of the favors that His Divine Majesty
had granted me, He had told me, among other things, that it was now time
to proclaim and make manifest the great deeds that He had worked in me.
And thus His infinite power and mercy might be praised and extolled, knowing
that all comes from that powerful hand, and that in me there has never been
nor is there more than lowliness and wretchedness.30

She attributes the ability to write for her confessors to miraculous intervention.
Most women who took the veil had at least some ability to read and write, which were
essential skills for devout life in the convent, but any notable degree of learnedness
found in their texts usually came from training received before they became nuns. In
part because of the isolation of her parents’ hacienda, Maria says she learned only the
rudiments of reading and writing from her mother, but that these fell into disuse for
many years. After her conversion, she relearned the skill of reading within a few days
(with a sister’s help) in order to study devotional texts.31 Later, when first commanded
by her confessor to write, she records that God suddenly empowered her to do so.
Marfa’s transcription of God’s speech and will sets up a dynamic that I refer to
as the mystic triad. Based on a triangular relationship between God, clerics, and nuns
about designated church roles and authority for men and women, the mystic triad
characterizes nearly all religious women’s autobiographical accounts from Teresa on.
82 POTENTIAL SAINTS

God as divine author of all life (and, therefore, texts) placed clerical mediators on earth
to be his intercessors. All types of clergy—whether bishops, priests, or monks—took
vows to guide souls toward God and were recognized as being ordained to interpret
God’s will. Because the sacraments had become paramount to Counter-Reformation
Catholic Church practice, confessors had a good deal of authority to judge a person s
life.
For their part in this triad, nuns took vows of complete obedience to their su¬
periors and therefore were required to follow confessors’ mandates. Yet the very nature
of visionary experience meant that God spoke directly to the individual, without an
intermediator. Because women were thought to be more prone to visionary experi¬
ence, the most typical situation to emerge was one in which God spoke directly to a
woman like Marfa, who acted as an instrument through which the divine sent mes¬
sages to others. She was God’s visionary scribe: “His Majesty answered me with these
words: ‘Your name shall not be mentioned, nor shall My name be on anyone’s lips
without saying I am He who has accomplished it all. You are nothing more than a
lowly tool.’ It is clear to see that these words are His alone, both good and true, and
would be even if they were spoken to me by the enemy himself; yet even this does
not keep me from fear.”32 Marfa's confessor, in turn, required written accounts of
her experiences and monitored them with the hope of guiding her along a safe spiri¬
tual path. In this system, Marfa is a “writer only by obedience” (escritora por obediencia)
to God and confessor. Depending on her own narrative needs, however, Marfa, like
her convent sisters, negotiated her position as scribe by playing off her experience of
God and His authority with her confessor’s institutional authority. As we see in the
following passage, God interrupts the confessor and speaks directly to Marfa: “This
happened in the confessional and I could not attend to or respond to what your
Lordship was telling me while this was occurring.”33 The dynamic interplay of God
as ultimate author, confessor as official intermediary, and Marfa as visionary scribe
frames nearly every account in Marfa’s journals. Writing becomes a balancing act: a
confession and apologia por vita suya before God and clerical intercessor, a vehicle for
revealing God’s handiwork and goodness, and an outlet for the creative construction
of a self that weaves together her personal history and the expectations for model
behavior.
Within this institutionalized method for gaining interpretative authority, how¬
ever, Marfa’s journals vary widely in tone and content, depending greatly on the nature
of her relationship with the confessor who had requested the account. Writing for
at least five confessors over a quarter century, the nun describes an often collabora¬
tive, rather than adversarial, situation. In some cases, she struggled for control over
the interpretation of her spiritual life. In others, Marfa and her confessor worked
together in a partnership in which each had a specific and vital role. In still other
instances, confessors freely reversed traditional roles, asked Marfa for advice, and
heeded her spiritual insights. With her first addressee, Manuel Barros, who had en¬
couraged visionary activity, she confidently records evidence of divine mercy in her
life; with Placido de Olmedo, the addressee of volume i and a fairly reserved confes¬
sor, the author expresses anxiety and frequently withholds material from him; and
with Bishop Angel de Maldonado, Marfa’s last addressee and the man who later called
 Maria de San Jose 83

Maria a mystic chronicler, the nun communicates conviction in her role as a mystic
and writer, even assuring the bishop of his good standing with Saint Augustine
(through her visionary experience, vol. 10) and describing her prophecies about the
pope (vols. 10 and n).
These were a series of dynamic confessor-penitent relationships from which both
parties gained, even though Maria was the subordinate partner with regard to insti¬
tutional power. Only one confessor, Juan Diomsio de Cardenas, appointed for less
than a year, significantly abused his authority by variously requiring her to write
twenty-three hours a day or not at all.34 From her confessors, Marfa de San Jose gained
recognition as a mystic, received guidance, and was given the authority to write ex¬
tensively. They, in turn, at the least had prayers said on their behalf and stood the
chance of gaining more direct access to the divine; as she herself says, she tried to
“teach them how to speak with God.” Some of Marfa de San Jose’s confessors also
found spiritual guidance and an indirect chronicler for their own lives. (For example,
she wrote short biographies of several of her confessors.) But negative aspects also
abounded on both sides. Her confessors surely had their patience tested over the years.
They must have felt significant anxiety as well: serious consequences could result if
they misjudged the nature of her spirit, as the Inquisition found Fray Luis de Granada
to have done with Marfa de la Visitacion. Ultimately, the confessor was responsible
for his spiritual daughter. Maria de San Jose, of course, had to deal with the fact that
each confessor in turn determined what, when, and how she confessed and wrote,
because she was always under obedience to him. That Marfa often had little control
over her writing was part of a larger effort to help her renounce attachment to and
ownership of all worldly things, even her own journals. The nun’s resolve was tested
at times: the first version of the confessional vida was withheld from her, and she was
told it had been burnt. Later, she was commanded to rewrite it. Similar incidents of
writings being withheld (or worse) marked the writings of Teresa of Avila’s Vida
and Madre Agreda’s Mistica ciudad, as well as that of works by John of the Cross and
Fray Luis de Leon.35
Marfa’s ongoing commentary about her writing clearly demonstrates the degree
to which she writes with full awareness of both her role as a woman writing and of
writing as an act of obedience to God and the confessor:

And if I were to tell your Reverence of the violence and opposition I en¬
counter in writing, I would never finish, because every sentence I write is
an enormous trial to me, and it causes me anguish and distress. And so I
would prefer not to go on, because I still have not set down all that I had
to write. And so your Reverence, being my Father, must ask Our Lord that
if I please Him by writing under this order of obedience, He should give
me some ease to write about the suffering by which the Lord tries me.36

As she attempts to find her place before God and the church, she illustrates the
impossibility of writing nakedly about one’s self, of ignoring culturally defined models
or awareness of potential readers. But while these factors could shape her narrative,
they could not wholly dominate it: she blends the time-tested model of the perfecta
religiosa with the multifaceted realities of her world.
84 POTENTIAL SAINTS

Official Biography and Rescripting Life Stories

When the time came for Maria’s biographer to follow the bishop of Oaxaca’s com¬
mand that he write a sacred biography of her, Santander y Torres had a distinct
advantage over Hansen when he wrote the life of Rosa de Lima. First, Hansen had
to depend on secondhand material; Santander y Torres had access to Maria’s multi¬
volume set of confessional writings. Perhaps because of this, he is one of the more
generous biographers of nuns in this period: he quotes extensively from her journals
and grants them validity within church doctrine, fsfonetheless, Santander y Torres
exemplifies how a male biographer often miscites his source or refocuses the mate-
rial.37 At times he slows the narrative tempo to recount Maria’s penances and ecsta-
sies; he quotes her own extensive details about self-mortifications and consolations,
demonstrating the essential link of a mystic’s body to access to the divine. (See fig¬
ure 3.2.) From the medieval biographers of mystics such as Catherine of Hen a on-
ward, a male preoccupation with extravagant asceticism and suffering at the hands
v of others often eclipsed the more subtle meanings that women like Marfa attached
_J:o their experiences.38
Santander y Torres carefully edits the nun’s accounts and manipulates his cita¬
tions of her journals when material did not fit the portrait of a perfccta religosia. In
particular, he recasts Marla’s stories about people who hindered her efforts to enter
the convent. He completely villainizes Marla’s sister Francisca, while Marla’s own
portrait of the difficult sister was more ambivalent. In another passage, Santander y
Torres radically alters Marla’s portrait of Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz, perhaps
in order to protect the prelate’s image. Although she relates hagiographic stories of
severe trials, Marla’s discussion of her dealings with the bishop is strikingly harsh.
She forthrightly depicts him as the embodiment of all those whom God put in her
path to test her vocation—an angry, stubborn man who publicly humiliated her in
the cathedral when she pleaded for a place in the Convent of Santa Monica:

Seeing that some women approached as if to confess to his Grace, I too

made my way to his feet. And as I was entirely wrapped in my shawl, he
did not know me at first until I began to speak to him. As soon as he rec¬
ognized me, he asked, “Why have you come here?” I told him why I had
come, to ask him for a place [in the convent], the place soon to be empty.
I had no sooner spoken these words than he pushed me away from his feet,
saying, “Leave here at once, and do not bother me! Have I not told you
there is no place for you?”—in a very loud voice, as though he had grown
angry at my impertinence. All the people there were astonished to see this,
and how annoyed the lord Bishop had become with me. For everyone there
heard his shouts. My fright and astonishment were so great upon hearing
him that I could not raise myself from his feet and did not know where to
flee, because the fright robbed me of all my strength. I got up as best I could,
so stunned that I neither knew nor saw where I was setting my feet, and as
I was going down the steps of the altar, I missed a step or level. I fell head¬
long, and slid down I don’t know how many steps. I landed right by the
. I

tgarag,-•nrg-
..

Hetrato dela. JV[e JVlaria de S. ^Joseph JKeligiofa di

las Agushnas JOecokt&s, Qr) da dor a de dos convert
tos; mum con el cargo deJAaestm deNdvisr:
as Mul'd de AAarzo del)19: su edad63. arfos *

Jundo enla Puebla _y en Oaxaca- Syhevfopj^.^

Figure 3.2 Woodcut of Madre Marfa de San Jose, 1723, from Vida by Santander y
Torres (Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana)
 skirts of one of my sisters who had gone with me. There I lay a short while
until I had recovered somewhat. I cried a great many tears, and though I
suffered this mortification, I had courage and valor to undergo still greater
trials to attain what I so desired, which was to become a nun.39

Rewriting this dramatic scene almost comically, Santander y Torres first silences
Maria’s repetitive use of the strong adjective “entero” (sternly upright) to describe
the bishop and then removes the sting from her criticism with an editorial comment
about the humor (gratia) of her angry words: “And in truth (Maria says with much
humor"), if the bishop had kicked me. I would consider it well done in order to attain
what I so desired.”40
As this example demonstrates, Santander y Torres clearly paraphrases her words
and yet he makes them appear as her own words from her journal. He conflates his
voice as biographer with hers as autobiographer. At times he writes in the third per¬
son about Maria, but uses her exact words from the manuscript. In other instances,
he interjects in the first person words for Maria that are not in the original account.
In the biography, “Maria” speaks about letting go of her earthly father in order to
gain knowledge of her heavenly father, but nowhere in her manuscript account about
her father’s death does she directly relate these two. Her narrative sequence suggests
this transition from biological father to spiritual father, but she did not record it as
the clearly didactic passage found in Santander y Torres’s text. By directly citing
“Maria” and elaborating on her life in the first person, Santander y Torres creates a
certain doubling of Maria’s “I”: it becomes not just her voice, but that of the official
church as well.
In addition, the biographer foregrounds Maria de San Jose”s lineage as a descen¬
ded of noble conquistadors—a fact she herself rarely mentions—and that she was
born in the Tepeaca-Tlaxcala region, where indigenous warriors had joined forces with
Cortes to defeat Montezuma. In so doing, Santander y Torres complements the con¬
servative messages preached in the church oratory about maintaining the status quo.
Much as Maria’s Spanish-born confessor, Bishop of Oaxaca Angel de Maldonado,
had preached in 1707 about St. Teresa’s support for a troubled monarchy, the
criollo Santander y Torres attempts to use Maria’s spiritual prestige to reinforce New
Spain’s elite social order and church hierarchy.41 Through his mediation of her self¬
representation, the male biographer safely frames the nun’s account in orthodoxy and
subordination to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while at the same time promoting her as
a new spiritual conquistadora. He admits in the prologue that while it is safer to read the
vidas of saints, a life like Marfa de San Jose’s demonstrates the “honey” that is being
produced in “Our rich America” (nuestra riquissima America). While Marfa’s writings helped
the church form a new hagiographic vida and exemplar, by changing her words Santander
y Torres furthered Marfa’s dream of becoming like a saint.
The history of the only work by Marfa to be published before the twentieth
century shows the same deep clerical reluctance to permit a woman to speak freely
in her own voice, no matter how useful and inspiring her words. Beginning while she
was still a nun at the Convent of Santa Monica (ca. 1693), every year during Holy
Week, Maria de San Jose had an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary, who guided the
nun through the Stations of the Cross—a multipart evocation of Jesus’ final sufferings
and death. As Maria reports in volume n, around 1710, cooperating with the Virgin’s
instructions to record and to publish the Stations for others’ benefit, Maria wrote out
her visions and gave them to one of her confessors, Fray Tomas Perez de la Torre.
Ten years later she heard that her Stations had been copied and were being circulated
in manuscript form in at least one monastery in Oaxaca, without ever having been
published. After receiving a second heavenly command, she rewrote the Stations, which
were finally published posthumously and went into at least five editions during the
eighteenth century.42
Maria possessed a strong sense of mission in the dissemination of the Stations
for others’ benefit, and although clergy responded slowly, they cooperated. Yet the
published text alters the original in three significant ways. First, the narrative of the
apparition is changed from first to third person; second, Maria’s descriptions about
her own feelings are completely deleted (for example, “Here I didn’t know . . .”);
and third, a prayer written in first person is inserted after each station. The church
used Maria’s personal experience of the divine to revitalize and stimulate popular
devotion to the Stations of the Cross, while curtailing some of Maria’s' more"per¬
sonal comments about the experience, perhaps to render the documents more uni¬
versal and to discourage the formation of a cult.
Nonetheless, upon Madre Maria’s death, clerics recognized her popularity and
value as an exemplary model. At the funerary mass celebrated upon her death, Santander
y Torres delivered a panegyric sermon about her heroic life that was published twice
within the next four years.43 The church quickly converted her life story and writing
into exemplary representations for convent and public consumption: Madre Maria de
San Jose is depicted in at least three portraits and four books as a mystic nun who had
all the makings of a saint (see figure 3.3). What is more, three of the books were popu¬
lar enough to go into second editions within a decade of the first printing.44
Through this hierarchical process of mediating women’s writings to turn them
into official church texts, Maria de San Jose’ became part of the Christian female vi¬
sionary tradition. Upon her death, she was compared with other important New World
visionaries; not surprisingly, these were some of the same women whose life stories Maria
had imitated throughout her life. By following the rules for her order and emulating
the lives of the saints, she was believed to have been granted divine favors; thus she too
became a model of Christian virtue for other criollas. Her life story later influenced
other biographers, such as those writing about her sister Leonor, who was abbess of a
Carmelite convent in Guadalajara, and another founder of the Oaxaca convent, Antonia
de la Madre de Dios.45 These two biographers inscribe their subjects into a tradition
that only fifteen or twenty years after her death included Madre Marfa’s life story. Even
today in the modem Convent of Santa Monica, the nuns keep the exemplary life of
their mystic sister alive by reading Santander y Torres's biography.46
Through the highly encoded genre of spiritual autobiography Counter-Reformation
visionary women formulated their own life narratives, working with the precept of
the imitatio Christi and the special role allotted to mystics. Using a narrative mixture
that reflects personal and institutional beliefs, Marfa’s accounts fill in many gaps in
our knowledge about daily life in the home and cloister and tell of a society and a
88 POTENTIAL SAINTS

Figure 3,3 Oil portrait of Madre Marfa de San Jose, ca. 1720, in the Museo del Arte
Virenal, Mexico (Courtesy of Josefma Muriel)

person whose identities were built on certain all-pervading convictions and norms.
Her voice also expresses the dynamic relationships that were born out of these inter¬
actions between individual and institution—between daughter and family, woman
and the Catholic Church, mystic and confessor, nun and God, high-ranking director
of novices and other nuns, and elite colonized subject and Spanish hegemony.
In the end, Marfa’s close adherence to devotional codes kept her within ortho¬
doxy, but it also probably contributed to the weakness of her case in Rome. The
Vatican wanted singular cases-^-of truly extraordinary holy individuals. By living in
 Maria de San Jose 89

a convent, safe from the public eye, and creating a conventional autohagiography,
Maria’s spiritual path was not innovative or remarkable in the way that Teresa of
Avila’s or even Rosa de Lima’s had been. Nonetheless, in Spanish America, church
texts about her spiritual life became popular enough to go into several editions. For
our purposes, Maria’s manuscript journals are key. In both Rosa’s and Catarina de
San Juan’s cases, we have little or no evidence of their own writings. But, we hear
Maria’s voice directly, providing us with the opportunity to study the process of
church mediation in posthumous texts. Her journals reveal the transmission of
Teresian elements to America—the narrative ingredients of and the possibilities for
a confessional vida. Maria de San Jose’s narrative of religious vocation, mystic expe¬
rience, and spiritual authority provides a blueprint for understanding the often un¬
spoken models which were futher rewritten by the women studied in the next three
chapters.

Chronology of Maria de San Jose

1656 Born Juana Palacios Berruecos, near Tepeaca, New Spain.

1687 Enters Convent of Santa Monica, Order of Augustinian Recollects,
in Puebla.
1688 Takes final vows as a black-veiled nun.
1691 Begins confessional accounts for Manuel Barros and Bishop
Fernandez de Santa Cruz.
1697 Leaves Puebla to found Convent of Nuestra Sehora de la Soledad in
Oaxaca; serves as novice mistress for the rest of her life there.
1703-4 Writes a formal Vida for Placido de Olmedo (vol. 1).
1710 Drafts her only work published in the colonial period, Stations of the
Cross.
1717 Rewrites the Stations.
1719 Dies and is buried at the Convent of Nuestra Sehora de la Soledad,
Oaxaca.
1719 Two editions are published of her funerary sermon, Oracion funebre, by
Fray Sebastian de Santander y Torres.
1723 Two editions are published of her biography, Vida de la venerable madre,
by Fray Sebastian de Santander y Torres; two editions are published
of her Stations.
1726? Bishop Angel Maldonado writes and publishes his tract proposing
Marfa’s beatification, Patri Excelso.
1773, 1782 Marfa’s Stations are republished.
II
'TVof Quite Sinners
4
The Tenth Muse
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (l 6f8—l6gf\

Tetters and Teaming in the Church

Am I perchance a heretic? And even if 1 were, could sheer force make me a saint?
—Sor Juana, Letter to Father Nunez

They can leave such things to those who understand them; as for me, I want no
trouble with the Holy Office, for I am but ignorant and tremble lest I utter some
ill-sounding proposition.
—Sor Juana, La respuesta

B etween 1690 and 1693 a storm was brewing over a nun’s writings in the cultural
center of New Spain, Mexico City. The same bishop who had urged Marfa de
San Jose to begin writing and who had signed the license granting the publication of
Ramos’s biography of Catarina de San Juan had just published Sor Juana Ines de la
Cruz’s scholastic critique of a theological point. As we saw in Madre Marfa’s case,
rarely were nuns’ works published in their own lifetimes and, in theory, nuns were
barred from publicly discussing theological issues. And yet Sor Juana, the most fa¬
mous nun of the colonial period, had written and published profane and sacred works
at the behest of clergy and viceroys. She was one of the first two women published
in America and wrote in nearly all the literary genres used by both men and women.1
For decades after her entrance into the cloister in 1669, Sor Juana had escaped the
literary limits imposed on religious women, composing everything from sharply bit¬
ing lines about men’s contradictory demands for women (“Silly, you men—so very
adept/at wrongly faulting womankind,/ not seeing you’re alone to blame/ forfaults
,V/
you plant in woman's mind”) to sublime devotional dramatic pieces (“Tell me where
he is whom my soul loves,/ where he feeds his lambs,/ and where he lays him down
to rest/ at the noontide hours./ For why should I be one who turns aside/ by the
/
folds where flocks of other swains abide?”).2 By 1690 she had acquired an extensive
library and her fame had spread with a collection of her work published in Spain
(Inundacion castdlida, 1689). Sor Juana’s artistic and intellectual life also extended to
frequent gatherings (tertulias) that she held in the convent locutorio, often attended by
Mexico City’s leading figures—among them, the noted intellectual, Carlos de Siguenza

93
NOT QUITE SINNERS

y Gongora, two sets of viceregal couples, and Bishop Manuel Fernandez de Santa
Cruz. Unlike the spiritual gatherings of important Limenos hosted by Rosa de Lima,
however, Sor Juana’s tertulias covered a wide range of secular and sacred topics.
It was perhaps in one such gathering, often forums for artistic and philosophical
debate, that Sor Juana first offered a scholastic critique of a theological point in an
influential Jesuit’s sermon. Her critique began a three-year debate (1690—1693) about
both her literary career and the appropriateness of her incursion into theology. In the
critique, Sor Juana noted how the sermon’s premises were built on illogical reasoning.
One of the interlocutors (by some accounts, Bishop Santa Cruz), taken with the bril¬
liance of the rebuttal, asked the nun to write down her arguments. Apparently without
Sor Juana’s consent, Bishop Santa Cruz then published Sor Juana’s thesis, the Carta
atenagorica [Letter worthy of Athena] (Puebla, 1690). In an outwardly contradictory move,
Bishop Santa Cruz made the nun’s incursion into the forbidden terrain of theological
debate available to a broader public and then admonished Sor Juana in his prologue
for her literary and theological pursuits:~“It is a pity that so great a mind should stoop
to lowly earthbound knowledge and not desire to probe into what transpires in heaven.
But since it does lower itself to ground level, may it not descend further still and pon-
der what goes on in hell!”3 He encouraged Sor Juana to follow, instead, Teresa of Avila’s
example as a woman author writing on devotional topics. While the bishop’s inten¬
tions remain enigmatic, what is clear is that the publication unleashed a flurry of re¬
sponses from supporters and detractors, as well as from Sor Juana herself. She would
later write her most famous autobiographical work, La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz
[the Reply to Sor Filotea] (1691), as a response to the bishop’s prologue and an at¬
tempt to clarify her position as a lettered nun.
The Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz makes a daring defense of Sor Juana’s right as
an individual, intellectually gifted by God, to study and write, in spite of church
restrictions on women’s learning. Sor Juana’s boldness continued after these initial
letters; with the help of her ally, the ex-vicereine of New Spain, Sor Juana’s second
volume of works—Obras—was published in Spain in 1692.4 The collection did not
exclude love verses or satire, and even republished the Carta atenagorica.5 A much larger
polemic over Sor Juana’s vocation was building, however, and it would end with one
of her defenders being summoned by the Inquisition. She herself may have been
entered into a secret trial conducted by the archbishop of Mexico (proceso arzobispal
secreto).5 In any case, the events led to the selling of her extensive library and her of¬
ficial rededication to her religious vows in 1693—1694.
Ultimately, Sor Juana’s life, although very different from the women studied
thus far, also embodied the contradictory attitudes of her times. While for years she
wrote for and entertained the most prominent civic, ecclesiastical, and intellectual
leaders of New Spam, she was the target of heated debates in both Mexico and Spam.
In Sor Juana’s case, the controversy over the interpretation of proper behavior for a
religious woman did not revolve around the representation of sanctity as it had for
Rosa, Catarina de San Juan, and Madre Maria; now the drama unfolded around her
secular accomplishments as author and intellect, over the issue of the propriety of a
religious woman’s education and writing. Sor Juana avoided for more than two de¬
cades the role of the perfecta religiosa who imitated Christ’s Passion and become known
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 95

instead as the Phoenix of America and the Tenth Muse, an author worthy of mythi¬
cal titles during her own lifetime.
What can the debate about Sor Juana’s literary and religious vocations and her
letters in response to the polemic tell us about the rules for religious women and
their roles in the church and in society? How do her letters employ conventional
epistolary and vida genres for nuns and at the same time undermine the traditional
portrait of a nun? As we will see, Sor Juana took advantage of church and society’s
desires to capitalize on the phenomenon of a bright woman who could serve as a
cultural or spiritual icon for the colony. She deftly worked with allies and, when
necessary, worked within church limits. In all cases, however, she created a strong
individual voice. Indeed, Sor Juana’s self-presentation is so strong throughout her
work that one critic argues it is the most clear and insistent in colonial Mexican lit¬
erature.7 The autobiographical voice, whether in prose, poetry, or drama, consistently
presents the idea of the genderless nature of the soul anchlhe intellect, and thisfin
turn, had strong implications for reinterpreting women’s roles.
~ "u'«——*‘*"*a**M**—*—Tninm—TnTaTTniii<iiiiiT>wllt{iiiiiiinm»i»»<iji>iini

Feminist studies in recent years have naturally focused on Sor Juana’s contribu¬
tion to a historic redefinition of the “appropriate” role for religious women. Although
her work was widely published in the three decades after her death (1695—1725), with
the spread of neoclassical culture, many baroque authors like Sor Juana faded from
the public eye for several centuries.8 At first slowly, with the mid—twentieth century
commemoration of her birth, and then more dramatically in 1995 with the three-
hundred-year anniversary of her death, readers began to rediscover Sor Juana’s liter¬
ary corpus. Perhaps one of the most notable turning points, however, occurred in
the 1980s when the larger political-intellectual trends of feminism embraced Sor Juana
as a precursor of the women’s rights movement. At the same time, Nobel Prize win¬
ner Octavio Paz published his landmark “restitution” of Sor Juana, Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz or The Traps of Faith (1982), which was soon translated for English readers.9 A
variety of contemporary studies exist regarding the nun’s life and works; they tend
to revolve around feminist analyses of Sor Juana’s work, new theories about church
teachings on obedience and free will, contextualizing studies of the major characters
in Sor Juana’s life, and the study of early editions and related primary documents that
have surfaced.10 The last decade in particular has seen the rediscovery of documents
related to Sor Juana’s life. Some scholars claim that several documents were actually
penned by her.11 What has not been studied thoroughly, however, is how Sor Juana
used the confessor-nun relationship to discuss topics tKat were typcally"off-lTmitsTor
religious women. Building on the work of a handlul of schoIalTwKoTwe‘polnmct to
the important role of epistolary and vida genres, I argue that, in fact, Sor Juana exploits
the ideological structure of traditional confessor-nun communiques—and the vida genre
in particular—in order to accomplish her own reworking of it.12
Three letters—the Carta al Padre Nunez (ca. 1682), Carta atenagorica (1690), and La
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691)—help us understand the limits imposed by the
church on women (and religious women writers, in particular), as well as the flex¬
ibility in how those restrictions were applied.13 Whereas hagiographers reworked the
life of Rosa de Lima to construct an identity that served a broad range of popular
and institutional demands, and Marla de San Jose' cautiously inserted her voice into
96 NOT QUITE SINNERS

the conventions of saints’ lives and divine authorship with the hope of becoming a
saint herself, Sor Juana drew on the prescriptions for nuns and their writings but
created a new script. Using the broad ideological possibilities of the epistolary genre
and mixing them with an at-times ironic use of hagiographic and vida de monja con¬
ventions, Sor Juana carefully rendered a new portrait of a perfecta religiosa, one that
could include a lettered nun (religiosa letrada). In the process, she contributed to the
debate about self-determination for women in the Catholic Church.

Portrait of an Author

Sor Juana was a product of her times—in terms of the circumstances of her birth,
her move to an urban area and eventually into the convent, and in her tenuous rela¬
tionships with church hierarchy. Yet, she was a highly unusual woman because of
her intellectual drive, her success in reaching the highest echelons of both church
and court, and her well-known and extensive publications in her own lifetime. Be¬
cause of Sor Juana’s fame and status as a Spanish American canonical author, we
know more about her life than about almost any woman of the period. Recent dis¬
coveries of historical documents, however, have revised our knowledge about Sor
Juana’s date of birth, final years, literary corpus, and interaction with important clergy.
Born in 1648 in a small town a day’s travel from Mexico City, Juana Ines de
Asbaje y Ramirez, was the daughter of a Spanish captain, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje,
and a criolla woman, Isabel Ramirez, who ran her father’s farm and gave birth to a
total of six children.14 Like nearly half the women of her time, Juana’s mother had
her children out of wedlock. As recent studies show, there were several economic
advantages for this choice, and Juana came from a long line of independent-minded
women who sought such advantage.15 By her own account in the Respuesta, Juana por¬
trays herself as having a certain independence of spirit and precociousness; she claims
that by age three she tricked a teacher into letting her attend an amiga (a girls’ school
for rudimentary education held in a private home) with her sister. Later, she report¬
edly learned Latin in fewer than twenty lessons and asked her mother if she could
disguise herself as a man in order to study science at the university in Mexico City.
Clearly unable to do so, Juana set about studying the books in her grandfather’s li¬
brary. By about age ten, Juana left home to live with relatives in Mexico City, a not
uncommon occurrence in criolla families if a young woman or man wanted to pur¬
sue more urban social or vocational outlets.16
In this multiracial city of some fifty-thousand inhabitants, the landscape was
dominated by the canals surrounding the city and the bridges leading into it. By the
mid-seventeenth century, the city center boasted a large main plaza with a cathedral-
in-progress on one side, the government offices (cabildo) on the other, and the vicere¬
gal palace on another. Sor Juana would spend five years in this religious and civil
administrative heart of New Spain.
Within a few years after her arrival in Mexico City, Sor Juana’s wit, charm, and
intellectual curiosity won her a place as a lady-in-waiting in the viceregal court. For
nearly five years she attended to the vicereine, the marquise of Mancera (who soon
became a friend), and participated actively in ceremonial and social activities at court.
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Juana’s phenomenal gifts for writing verse and accumulating knowledge became widely
known and sought out. The viceroy himself decided to test (and perhaps display)
Juana by assembling forty of the most learned secular and religious men in Mexico
City. The viceroy described how a variety of theological, scientific, and historical
questions were posed. Juana outmaneuvered all her examiners: “The way in which a
royal galleon would ward off a few canoes who were assailing it, so did Juana Ine's
dispatch the questions, arguments, and replies which so many persons, each in his
own way, proposed to her.”17
By 1667, Juana had taken stock of her gifts and desired nothing more than to
pursue her intellectual vocation. As she herself reports in the Respuesta, she was against
the idea of marrying (perhaps because marriage was far too demanding of a woman’s
time) and, instead, chose the convent, which offered a degree of autonomy for study.
In consultation with the Jesuit Antonio Nunez de Miranda, who served as both her
own and the viceregal couples’ spiritual advisor, Juana first entered the prestigious
but strict order of the Discalced Carmelites located just a block from the palace.
Withrrr Inonths, however, she left because of illness. In 1669 Juana made a second
attempt, this time in a regular order, the Hieronymite Convent of Santa Paula in
Mexico City. Given a dowry by her godfather and able to circumvent requirements
for legitimate birth because of her talent, Sor Juana took final vows. As in the case of
other black-veiled nuns, her duties included praying the Divine Office and helping
run the convent, at times in the capacity of accountant and music teacher for the
girls’ school that was annexed to the convent. Although the nuns at the Convent of
Santa Paula observed the Augustinian Rule for nuns, which was also used by Marfa
de San Jose’s order, as adapted by Bishop Santa Cruz for the Hieronymites, they did
not follow it to the letter.18 Sor Juana and her convent sisters lived comfortably, re¬
ceived visitors, and in general did not adhere strictly to vows of poverty or total
enclosure.
Sor Juana lived in a two-story “cell” (more like a condominium) within the walls
of the convent, had her own slave (a gift from her mother), maintained one of the
largest libraries in New Spain, held regular conversations with the viceroys and oth¬
ers, and continued to write poetry. Not restricted to literary activity, Sor Juana’s mind
held an insatiable curiosity for a broad range of knowledge. Period documents re¬
veal that her library had theological, philosophical, scientific, and literary works and
that she corresponded with some of the greatest intellectuals in Mexico City.19 In
spite of communal duties and a vow of obedience to church superiors, the convent
gave Sor Juana a degree of protection and solitude for her intellectual and artistic
vocation.
From within the cloister, Sor Juana continued to have ties with the court.
Through her writing she participated fully in the thick of religious, civic, and cul¬
tural celebrations in viceregal Mexico. Commissioned to write poetry of etiquette
for birthdays and funerals, popular musical religious verse (villancicos) for church feasts,
courtly love poetry for literary contests, one-act sacramental plays for Corpus Christi
celebrations, and prose descriptions of ceremonial arches to be erected for the en¬
trance of a new viceroy, Sor Juana’s work covers the gamut of popular and erudite,
profane and sacred baroque literature. Beyond these official commissions, Sor Juana
98 NOT QUITE SINNERS

herself delighted in writing about her quest for knowledge and about human rela¬
tionships. She wrote some of her most touching verse to her close friends the vicereines
(the marquise of Mancera in 1664—1676; the countess of Paredes in 1680—1688). Some
of her most barbed satire focused on relationships between men and women. One of
the most stunning poetic pieces to emerge out of baroque Hispanic letters is Sor
Juana’s nine-hundred-line silva, First Dream, which elaborates in meter the abstract
discursive journey of her soul as it attempted to comprehend the nature of the uni¬
verse. Simultaneously inscribed within and breaking out of baroque conventions for
popular and erudite verse, Sor Juana’s work added an innovative, often rebellious
voice that appealed to her contemporaries.
Her record of intellectual questing and her verses about society’s views of women
help set the scene for the controversy that later erupted over her literary career. Up
until the last several years of her life, Sor Juana parodied conventional depictions of
women and created alternate portraits. To underscore the artificiality of artistic
conventions for describing women, Sor Juana rewrote—often with a strong dose of
humor—Petrarchan conventions in which women’s exterior beauty was the sole focus
of the male poet’s eye and was described in terms of metaphorical equivalents that
had little to do with human qualities. 20 (she argues instead for the idea that all human
beings are most essentially beings with a soul, which is sexless: “My body/ disin-
clined to this man or that, serves only to house the soul/ you might call it neuter 0/
abstract.”^
During this time, Sor Juana enjoyed the support of the court and the tolerance of
most clergymen, but early in 1682 she broke with her adversarial and influential confes¬
sor Antonio Nunez de Miranda. In a letter rediscovered twenty years ago, Carta al Padre
Nunez, Sor Juana bitterly complains about his insistence that she follow a narrow inter¬
pretation of proper behavior for nuns and that she stop writing verse. She promptly
dismissed him as her confessor. With Nunez’s power over her life diminished, Sor Juana
wrote copiously for nearly a decade. She only returned to writing in defense of her
literary pursuits in 1691 with the Respuesta to the bishop’s publication of the Carta atenagonca.
But this time, the letters were made more public and led to her official silencing in
1693—1694. She died a year later in an epidemic that swept the convent.

Letters, Vidas, and a New Role for Nuns

The core of the polemic over Sor Juana’s religious and literary vocation is clearly
revealed in the 1682 confrontation between the nun and her confessor, Nunez de
Miranda. Nunez was a powerful figure within the Catholic Church: he was a con¬
fessor to viceroys, calificador for the Inquisition, one-time professor at the Jesuit Colegio
del Espiritu Santo (in Puebla), head of an important brotherhood, and a prolific
devotional author.22 A spiritual counselor who took his charge seriously, Nunez wrote
several guides for nuns. He took the church’s teachings that nuns were “brides of
Christ” one step further: they were “widows of Christ” who should retire completely
from worldly concerns. In addition, he adhered staunchly to the Counter-Reformation
emphasis on obedience to church superiors as the most fundamental vow of monas¬
tic life: “For the [vow] of obedience she sacrifices her own volition, free will and
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

entire/soul. ’23 In his official position as censor for the Inquisition, as well as one of
her spiritual directors, Nunez had approved Catarina de San Juan’s virtuous obedi¬
ence to the Jesuits and, later, he wrote a prologue to Ramos’s biography of the beata.
Likewise, Nunez had helped guide Sor Juana into the religious life, advising her of
jhe danger of staying in the world” with her beauty and wit. By some accounts, he
persuaded a rich gentleman to be her benefactor and pay the large dowry required
for entrance into San Jeronimo.24 Clearly, Sor Juana’s continued literary production
and interaction with court members flew in the face of his hopes for her religious
vocation.
The letter that Sor Juana wrote to Nunez in 1682 to break with him reveals the
essence of their dispute, a dispute that Sor Juana would voice formally in the Respuesta.25
Using the personal tone of an informal letter, the nun questioned Nunez’s authority
to interpret God’s will for her: "What direct authority ... did you have to dispose
of my person and my God-given free will?”26 She argues that only God has the power
to make saints: “Only the grace and assistance of God are capable of producing
saints. 27 To study was to employ God’s gifts and, in so doing, move along the road
to salvation. God created many keys to heaven, and Nunez’s was not the only one:

For the God who created and redeemed and bestows so many mercies on
me will provide a means whereby my soul . . . will not go astray even if it
be without Your Reverence’s guidance, for heaven has many keys and is
not restricted to one judgment only. . .. Salvation consists more in the
desiring than in the knowing and the former depends more on me than on
a confessor. . .. What rule dictates that this salvation of mine must be by
means of Your Reverence? Cannot it be someone else? Is God’s mercy re¬
stricted and limited to one man, even if he be as prudent, as learned and as
saintly as Your Reverence?28

Like Marla de San Jose, Sor Juana exercised her right as a nun to choose a compat¬
ible confessor (and, therefore, to dismiss one as well). She pointed a finger at Nunez’s
misinterpretation of God’s will and left him so that she could continue on her path
toward God without interference.
Sor Juana’s two letters, written almost ten years later, reveal that, after years of
relative freedom after breaking with Nunez, differences of opinion over religious
women’s roles had again surfaced. To understand Sor Juana’s masterful Carta atenagorica
and La Respuesta, as well as her alternative religious self-portrait, we need to under¬
stand Sor Juana’s artful molding of the conventions and ideological possibilities of
the epistle with the confessional vida. Rosa Perelmuter argues that Sor Juana was well
aware of the rhetorical possibilities of the letter as a genre. In the Respuesta she adeptly
blends the Ciceronian forensic model, in which letters were the expository vehicle
for proving a case, with the Erasmian personal letter, based on an informal, conver¬
sational style of writing. In fact, Sor Juana employed Renaissance epistolary conven¬
tions in all the letters discussed in this chapter and drew on the genre’s ideological
purposes to strengthen her arguments.
By Sor Juana’s time, the epistle had a long history and a varied use. A well-defined,
broadly used genre that dated from antiquity, the letter was used for both personal
IOO NOT QUITE SINNERS

and official purposes. As Jamile Trueba Lawand’s study of the Renaissance episto¬
lary tradition reveals, Greco-Roman authors such as Demetrios and Cicero charac¬
terized the letter as half of a dialogue aimed at an absent person and generally written
in a simple yet elegant style (chap. i). Personal letters in particular were to be written
“as a portrait of one’s soul.”29 The official letter, discussed in particular by Cicero
and Quintilian, could serve as the expository vehicle both for information and for
treatises of a poetic or philosophical nature (chap. 4). Early church fathers of Chris¬
tianity used letters to accentuate the personal experience of religion on the one hand
and to expound theological points in a clear format on the other.30
By the medieval period, the precept of the ars diet amen greatly influenced the
development of the genre, and the formal aspects of the letter were highlighted over
its possibilities for personal correspondence. With the early modern rediscovery of
literary forms from antiquity, the genre gained new life and became a varied exposi¬
tory vehicle. Besides its use for personal correspondence, the letter became part of
the studis humanitatis curriculum and also was widely used for literary and philosophi¬
cal treatises. Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Juan Luis de Vives were
among the many humanists who wrote treatises defining the genre.31 In addition,
collections of letters were widely published for popular reading. For our purposes, it
is interesting to note that Teresa of Avila’s Epistolario was published in two volumes
in 1658, including both official letters (which reflected a high style and rhetorical use
of repetition) and personal letters (written in a familiar, low style). Teresa herself
was no stranger to treatises that had used the form, as she had read St. Francis of
Borja’s and Fray Luis de Granada’s works.32
As studies of Sor Juana’s library reveal, she was familiar with authors who had
written in or about the epistolary genre. She cites many, such as Cicero, Quintilian,
early church fathers (especially Paul and Jerome), and Teresa of Avila. In addition,
Sor Juana had read several of the letters addressed to nuns written by Nunez de
Miranda and Bishop Santa Cruz.33 Drawing on the epistolary genre’s possibilities,
in the Carta atenagorica Sor Juana employs a familiar yet legalistic tone and structure.
In the Respuesta she continues to combine the familiarity of a personal letter with the
formal, rhetorical defense of a case. But she also adds to it the pedagogical purpose
of an epistolary treatise.
As mentioned, Bishop Santa Cruz was the probable catalyst and addressee for
Sor Juana’s Carta atenagorica. Addressed rather generically to “Muy Sehor rm'o,” the
Carta was a brilliant refutation of a sermon delivered about fifty years before by a
well-known Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio Vieira. Using scholastic argumentation within
the context of a letter, Sor Juana highlighted the errors in Vieira’s sermon—itself a
refutation of three church fathers’ arguments about Christ’s greatest Jineza, or gift to
mankind. She cleverly dismantled the sermon, restored the church fathers’ theses,
and added her own theological interpretation. As a woman who defended her right
to pursue god-given talents, she presented Christ’s greatest gift as that of the bene-
/zoos negativos—that is, despite being all-powerful, God allows individuals to use free
will and thus to grow in virtue. The theology of free will and God’s gifts to each
individual would become one of Sor Juana’s champion causes.34 While taking on
serious theological polemics, Sot Juana masked the letter’s contents with a conversa-
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

tional, at times jovial, tone and drove home her logical development of a case within
the main body of the letter, which is organized around a series of “proofs” (“prueba
mas, mas, probado pues,” “apoyar mas,’ “pruebalo por razon,” “el mayor aprieto
del precepto, etc.) and blocks of oratorical exclamations and rhetorical questions.35
Nonetheless, Sor Juana did not fail to close the refutation with a brief bow to supe¬
riors and a recognition of her own obedient role: “I place all I have said under the
censure of our Holy Mother Catholic Church, as her most obedient daughter.”36 The
multifaceted roles of the epistolary genre served Sor Juana well: she blurred the line
between a conversational, humble letter befitting her status as a woman addressing a
superior and a more formal philosophical argument.
When Bishop Santa Cruz published the refutation with his ambiguous prologue
about Sor Juana’s learned and literary pursuits and gave it the laudatory title Carta
atenagorica—emphasizing its nature as an erudite letter, one worthy of the Goddess
of Wisdom, Athena—the bishop firmly placed Sor Juana’s work in a narrative genre
that was permissible for a nun; she had written a letter, not a sermon or a theological
treatise.37 As we saw in Marfa de San Jose’s case, Bishop Santa Cruz was a powerful,
sometimes mercurial bishop who was devoted to building charitable institutions for
women, and he wrote numerous letters and convent rules for his beloved nuns. He
delighted in God’s prodigious hand at work in an exceptional woman and yet en¬
deavored to ensure that the world did not “rob God of His own.”38 Ultimately, how¬
ever, Sor Juana’s incursion into theology went beyond Bishop Santa Cruz’s control;
the publication reached other readers who strongly objected to Sor Juana’s literary
and public roles.
To many readers today, the storm unleashed by a debate about a nearly fifty-
year-old sermon is perhaps puzzling. Sor Juana’s love poetry seems much more dar¬
ing. But it is important to recall that sermons could be published—and Vieira’s had
been republished several times after 1650—and they often dealt with sensitive church
doctrine. Thus they could be influential church documents for many years. In addi¬
tion, recent studies underscore that Sor Juana’s text may have served to deepen the
rift between her ex-confessor Padre Nunez and herself. Elfas Trabulse in particular
argues that the real target of Sor Juana’s Carta atenagorica was not Vieira, but her ex¬
confessor Nunez: both were Jesuits who strongly advocated the role of the Eucha¬
rist in the church.39 The differences of opinion extended to clergy at the highest
echelons in New Spain, including the misogynistic, ascetic archbishop of Mexico,
Francisco Aguiar y Seijas. Although there are several hypotheses about the motives
behind Santa Cruz’s publication and the archbishop’s role, it seems that Sor Juana
was caught in a dispute over the church’s enforcement of proper behavior among
religious women. And, because she was such a highly visible nun, the stakes were high.40
In response to the polemic caused by her own literary vocation, Sor Juana drafted
La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz and returned to the arguments she had used against
Nunez.41 This time, however, her remarks are directed to Bishop Santa Cruz and
written in a more formal statement that ultimately was made public through the cir¬
culation of manuscript copies and a posthumous publication.42 Referring to her own
previous letters and Bishop Santa Cruz’s prologue, Sor Juana builds her Respuesta on
the foundation of the central theology of free will, as expressed in the Carta atenagorica.
102 NOT QUITE SINNERS

She applies this theology in personal terms, within the spiritual director-daughter
relationship, as seen in the Carta al Padre Nunez; and she refers to Santa Cruz’s invo¬
cation of Sts, Paul and Teresa in his discussion of model behavior for women in the
Catholic Church.
La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz is a carefully crafted rhetorical piece that defies
strict generic categorization; the letter is variously called a self-defense and autobi¬
ography.43 Sor Juana includes in the Respuesta a long narrative of her life story and
her vocation for letters. Studying the epistolary structure of the Respuesta, Rosa
Perelmuter observes that Sor Juana purposely highlights the narrative section, rather
than the proof. Sor Juana opens with statements of humility (the exordio, lines i—215),
continues with the story of her call to a life of study (the narration, lines 216—844),
and then culminates with a list of antecedents: a catalogue of learned women, church
fathers’ views of women and poetry (the proof, lines 845—1418). The Respuesta then
closes by repeating statements of humility (the peroracion, lines 1419—3s).44 Perelmuter
proposes that the familiar tone and the lengthy narrative section reflect a move away
from the Ciceronian juridical style and toward the Erasmian personal letter. Nota¬
bly, these familiar elements also coincide with the extended nun-confessor commu¬
nique', the vida espiritual. The letter, used in the early church to express personal religious
experience, had developed over the centuries into a frequent expository vehicle for
religious women writing to their male superiors. As we saw with Maria de San Jose,
what often began as a series of cuentas de conciencia or relaciones de espiritu (in which a nun
detailed her intimate spiritual experiences at the behest of her confessor) could later
develop into a request for a formal vida. While continuing to reflect the confessor-
penitent, reader-writer dynamic found in letters, the vida genre was much more highly
structured and influenced by hagiographic conventions.
Sor Juana creates a tight rhetorical parallel between her self-presentation and
the narrative posture, structure, themes, and topics that characterized the vida genre.
She builds her argument by cleverly reworking the very beliefs and traditions about
religious women that she seeks to undermine. But how exactly does Sor Juana em¬
ploy the rhetoric and structure of the vida to alter its ideology? Taking Bishop Santa
Cruz’s suggestion to follow in Teresa’s footsteps, Sor Juana models her Respuesta on
Teresian conventions from the Libro de su vida to justify her life path and to critique
percepts about women’s religious lives. As we will see, Sor Juana begins her vida at
essentially the same point as her sisters—the moment of the divine call (vos me
coegistis)—and follows much the same process: the imitatio Christi. But she deliberately
chooses a nonconventional way to justify her path: she shuns the culturally accept¬
able (though still dangerous) practice of following the mystic’s path. Instead, Sor
Juana suggests that a woman who has been given a good intellect should use it to
fashion her self-image, just as the woman who has been given visionary gifts should
use them to define herself. After all, she argues, all things issue from God. By em¬
ploying the conventions of the vida for an alternate life story, Sor Juana validates the
use of the genre for religious women’s self-representation, but she changes the typi¬
cal portrait of a nun.
From the first, Sor Juana’s Respuesta moves well beyond conventional epistolary
humility in the exordio (paragraphs 1-5), which suggests that she is not drawing on
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 103

Cicero or Erasmus but rather on church expectations for nuns in their writing to
confessors. In a hyperbolic style, Sor Juana emphasizes her humility, ignorance, and
obedience to superiors, echoing the vida. As a nun she is an escritora por obedienca. Sor
Juana confesses to being tearful and speechless upon learning that “Sor Filotea”
(Bishop Santa Cruz’s alias) had published the Carta atenagorica. As a “humble” nun,
Sor Juana argues, tongue-in-cheek, that her writings are not hers to control. She asks:
“By chance, am I something more than a poor nun, the slightest creature on earth
and the least worthy of drawing your attention?”45 And yet, Sor Juana claims a like¬
ness to Moses, who was chosen by God in spite of his “stammering”: she is unable
to articulate her confused thoughts about writing and publishing under obedience
to others. She further evokes the triangular relationship between a nun, her clerical
superior, and God by repeatedly using the word “confess” (confesar) and reminding
Bishop Santa Cruz that God is the ultimate author and judge of her life: “Blessed are
you my Lord God, for not only did you forbear to give another creature the power
to judge me, nor have you placed that power in my hands. Rather, you have kept
that power for yourself.”46 In addition, Sor Juana ironically portrays herself as ig¬
norant and bowing to the Inquisition: “They can leave such things to those who
understand them; as for me, I want no trouble with the Holy Office, for I am but
ignorant.”47 Sor Juana’s ironic tone is yet more apparent when she uses a string of
hyperbolic adjectives to describe the bishop’s own letter: “your immensely learned,
prudent, devout, and loving letter.”48

Vos Me Coegistis

Having parodied the framing device and rhetorics of the vida, Sor Juana moves into
the core element of the genre, the narration of a vocation, which coincides with the
narrative section of the letter. An essential element of every vida was an apologia por vita
sua, which presented the author’s life as one that mirrored the lives of Christian saints
and martyrs. As we saw in Madre Marfa de San Jose’s narrative, the vida typically
sketched a Christian upbringing, a call to the religious life, and proof of following a
life devoted to God’s will, often depicted as a mixture of suffering (imitatio Cbristi)
and the manifestation of God’s goodness (misericordias) in her life. If the vida deviated
from this pattern, the author was obligated to reveal the cause for this lapse.
In Sor Juana’s hands, the conventional narration of a Christian upbringing and
religious vocation takes on a new twist. She announces that God called her to the life
of letters:

My writing has never proceeded from any dictate of my own, but a force
beyond me; I can in truth say, “vos me coegistis” [You have compelled me].
One thing, however, is true, so that I shall not deny it (first because it is
already well known to all, and second because God has shown me His fa¬
vor in giving me the greatest possible love of truth, even when it might count
against me). For ever since the light of reason first dawned in me, my incli¬
nation to letters was marked by such passion and vehemence that neither
the reprimands of others (for I have received many) nor reflections of my
own (there have been more than a few) have sufficed to make me abandon
104 NOT QUITE SINNERS

my pursuit of this native impulse that God Himself bestowed on me. His
Majesty knows why and to what end He did so.49

According to church teachings, spiritual vocations and powers were divine gifts,
and nuns spent much time in demonstrating God’s grace at work in their spiritual
paths. They needed to tame their own wills in order to passively receive his mercies,
but they also had to work actively at prayer, good deeds, and penance in order to
make themselves worthy of such blessings. Sor Juana clearly frames her narration
within this context of vo5 me coegistis.50 The call, as in her convent sisters’ experiences,
led Sor Juana to take the veil as a bride of Christ, to become “dead to the world,”
and to leave the development of her vocation in God’s hands: “Your Majesty knows
too that, not achieving this, I have attempted to entomb my intellect together with
my name and to sacrifice it to the One who gave it to me; and that no other motive
brought me to the life of Religion.”51
The call to God required work and sacrifice. Sor Juana uses conventional vo¬
cabulary and stories to report her own experience in following the road to Christ.
She echoes vida phrases, such as “To go on with the narration of this inclination of
mine, of which I wish to give you a full account,”52 formally linking the Respuesta
with autobiographical genres. And she recalls the feeling of urgency toward her vo¬
cation, which she experienced at an early age. Rather than describe a burning love
for Christ and reading about his saints like other nuns, Sor Juana talks of a burning
love for reading. Rather than speak of disobeying parents in order to fight the Moors
as Teresa had wanted to do, Juana records sneaking off at age three to learn to read
at a local girls’ school. Rather than practice severe self-mortification to remain in
prayer as Rosa had, Juana cut her hair to punish herself for not learning enough. All
the same, Sor Juana’s “inclination” also led her to the convent. Notably, however
the Respuesta says nothing about the nearly five years between leaving her family and
entering the convent, a time spent as a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court. Per¬
haps this seemed an unbecoming element in an ideal portrait of a studious, solitary
bride of Christ removed from the world.
In recounting her years as a bookish nun, Sor Juana continues to draw on the
key spiritual precept of the vida: everything comes from God. As in the account of
her secular life, Sor Juana transforms the burning love for Christ and knowledge of
the divine universe through spiritual experience seen in Teresa and Madre Marfa into
an insatiable love of learning in order to understand the Queen of Knowledge, the¬
ology: “In sum, we see how this Book contains all books, and this Science includes
all sciences, all of which serve that She may be understood. And once each science is
mastered (which we see is not easy, or even possible), She demands still another
condition beyond all I have yet said, which is continual prayer and purity of life, to
entreat God for that cleansing of spirit and illumination of the mind required for an
understanding of such high things. And if this be lacking, all the rest is useless.”53
Much as a mystic who pursues divine knowledge through the three vias, Sor Juana
argues that she must pray, go through the active process of purgation of the will, and
seek illumination. Notably absent is a direct reference to the rare, final stage of union
in which the mystic is submerged in the Godhead. Sor Juana proposes that simply
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 105

studying the multitude of disciplines and the world around her leads to God, who is
the center and author of all things: ‘All things proceed from God, who is at once the
center and circumference, whence all lines are begotten and where they have their
end. 54 Most religious women who wrote vidas describe visionary and at times mys¬
tical experiences of knowing God. Sor Juana is content to know God through the
study of his creation.

Imitatio Christi

To follow the path to God, however, was to experience suffering, as Christ had suf¬
fered in his Passion in order to save humankind. Taking Christ’s life as an example, the
precept of the imitatio Christi in Spanish America centered on the Teresian dictate “padecer
o morir.” Suffering—and the acceptance of it as God’s will—was the essence of the
imitatio Christi and the one path to salvation. Sor Juana begins with themes common to
her sisters’ accounts: the difficulty of following a calling without direction from a con¬
fessor (for Sor Juana, a teacher: “What a hardship it is to learn from those lifeless let¬
ters, deprived of the sound of a teacher’s voice and explanation; yet I suffered all these
trials most gladly for the love of learning”)55 and without the solitude necessary for
cultivating a religious vocation (for Sor Juana the duties of communal life in the con¬
vent). To remind the reader that she is writing a confessional vida, Sor Juana repeats
such words as “confieso” and “inclinasion,” before going on to describe her willing¬
ness to endure hardships and even to seek them out for the sake of her vocation. For
weeks at a time she refrained from contact with her beloved convent sisters—risking
their rebuff—in order to devote herself to her studies. Yet more difficult was endur¬
ing the outright envy of others who condemned her.
After noting Athenian and Machiavellian thought on the nature of envy, Sor
Juana draws a more extended parallel between her “strange martyrdom” and Christ’s
own Passion. While most of her Mexican contemporaries focused on mirroring the
physical suffering of Christ—with bodily mortification, fasts, and prayers concen¬
trated on his cruxifiction—Sor Juana shifts the focus to two symbolic moments in
the Passion: the condemnation of Christ by the Pharisees and his crown of thorns.
Christ’s Passion becomes a vehicle to discuss the interconnected nature of knowl¬
edge, wisdom, and love, and humankind’s contradictory responses to them. Echoing
the debates between the experimentados and letrados that Teresa struggled with, Sor Juana
discusses the conflict in a new context. While the learned Pharisees condemned Christ,
Teresa responded to him with love. Envy and arrogance blind human beings, espe¬
cially some men, argues Sor Juana.
At this point in the narrative, Sor Juana audaciously identifies her path with
Christ’s suffering and the apostle Peter: she has been persecuted not because she is
wise, but rather because she pursued wisdom in the name of God, who is knowledge:
“My Lady, I do not wish (nor would I be capable of such foolishness) to claim that
I have been persecuted because of my knowledge, but rather only because of my love
for learning and letters, and not because I had attained either one or the other.”56
Certainly many vida authors at the climax of the account of their suffering claim a
special relationship with or resemblance to a saint. In most cases, however, the par¬
allel is not made directly by the author but through a supernatural appearance of the
106 NOT QUITE SINNERS

saint speaking on behalf of the autobiographer: the author declares that she is merely
recording the incident in the narrative. The saint, and in some cases God himself,
acts as an intermediary through which the author can assert the value of her life,
without overstepping the limits of humility. Sor Juana, however, chooses to present
the parallel using her God-given capacity to argue a logical, convincing case.57
Continuing the “full report about her inclination,” Sor Juana recounts specific
anecdotes about suffering at the hands of others, only to see God’s gifts shine more
brightly in her. When prohibited for a period of time from reading because the pri¬
oress thought it might lead to monitoring by the Inquisition, Sor Juana could not
help but study the marvels of the natural world of geometrical lines, patterns of spin¬
ning tops, and chemical characteristics of eggs when cooking. All lead to the same
underlying argument: the lack of individual will in the manifestation of her talent, a
key indication of its divine origins (“without my having control over it”).58 And yet,
Sor Juana mixes humor with her portrait as an ideal nun. She concludes: “Had
Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more.”59

Sometiendome Luego a lo que Sentenciare

Sor Juana closes the “simple account of my inclination to letters” and suggests that
her reader can now judge her life: “And so I entrust the decision to your supreme
skill and straightway submit to whatever sentence you may pass, posing no objection
or reluctance.”60 The use of juridical language, as noted by Perelmuter, serves as a
transition to the “proof” section of the letter. The case history has concluded, and
the arguments for the case will be presented: a defense of Sor Juana’s right to write
poetry and to study, and, by extension, a proposal to allow all individuals with the
proper aptitude to do the same (suggesting, in turn, that this could include religious
women and exclude dull-witted men). Acting as her own attorney, Sor Juana draws
on historical precedent, the authority of the Bible, and patriarchal church texts as
she logically examines the polemical issue of women’s learning and roles in the Catholic
Church. Elaborating on arguments first presented years earlier in her letter to Padre
Nunez, she catalogs learned women from antiquity to the seventeenth century, rein¬
terprets St. Jerome’s and St. Paul’s teachings about women, particularly the latter’s
“Let women keep silence in the churches” (Mulieres in Ecclesia taceant), and creates a
new authority by citing contemporary Mexican theologian Juan Arce’s work, which
advocated the pursuit of learning by women. Sor Juana’s catalog of learned women
who played important roles in history adds more credence to her argument.
And yet, as we saw in the narrative section of the letter, this “proof” section,
which is characteristic of legalistic epistles and treastises, also employs the conven¬
tions of a woman religious writing about her life. Each element in the proof corre¬
sponds to a strategy used by her convent sisters. Sor Juana first compares her life’s
pursuits to the genealogy of saints, within the catalog of learned women: “I see the
Egyptian Catherine, lecturing and refuting all the learning of the most learned men
of Egypt. I see a Gertrude read, write, and teach.”61 Next, Sor Juana argues that her
calling follows contemporary published guides by clerics. Just as Teresa carefully
delineated the type of spiritual vision she experienced, by using specific church guide¬
lines published on the topic, Sor Juana demonstrates how she followed Arce’s coun-
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 107

sel about women s need for education. Boldly ignoring her own ex-confessor’s guides,
Sor Juana suggests that Arce s argument elucidates how Paul’s and Jerome’s writings
about women in the church have often been misinterpreted. Historical precedent itself
shows that paradigms of feminine saintliness in the seventeenth century contradicted
contemporary interpretations: “How is it that we see the Church has allowed a
Gertrude, a Teresa, a Brigid, the nun of Agreda, and many other women to write?
.... And now in our own time we see that the Church permits writing by women
saints and those who are not saints alike; for the nun of Agreda and Marfa de la
Antigua are not canonized, yet their writings go from hand to hand. Nor when Sts.
Teresa and others were writing, had they yet been canonized.’’62 Sor Juana shows
how church history itself contradicts Paul’s dictum that women should be silent in
the church.
In fact, Sor Juana proposes, much like Teresa and Marfa de San Jose' in their
vidas, that men often were poor spokesmen for God. Whereas her sisters subtly in¬
struct confessors through examples of good versus bad spiritual directors—a sort of
alternative to the popular manuals for confessors—Sor Juana lists men who have
harmed the Catholic Church with their use of knowledge, among them, Martin Luther
himself and his reform: “This is what the Divine Letters became in the hands of that
wicked . . . Luther, and all other heretics. . .. Learning harmed them.”63 Sor Juana
asserts that the dilemmas women encounter with the church are often caused by men
and, by implication, suggests that if women could share equally in the pursuit of
understanding and truth, such difficulties would be diminished.
Drawing on the didactic potential of the vida, Sor Juana creates a new role for
women in the Catholic Church. She exclaims: “Oh, how many abuses would be
avoided in our land if the older women were as well instructed as Leta and knew
how to teach as is commanded by St. Paul and my father St. Jerome!”64 Moreover,
she calls for change, suggesting that people be examined for their talent before be¬
ginning to study. The lesson is clear: inept individuals of any sex can cause great
harm, and girls need to have access to female teachers to avoid being uneducated.
Mixing the didacticism of the vida with the pedagogical and ideological possibilities
of the epistle, Sor Juana adds to the well-established querelles des femme debate and lit¬
erary tradition, which date at least from the fifteenth century and the work of Chris¬
tine de Pizan.65
As Sor Juana closes the section on the proof, she both reiterates her thesis and
rhetorically apologizes for it. She alternates between didactic statements and self-
defense, between authoritative church texts and proclamations of obedience. After
arguing that most heretics were men, for example, Sor Juana retreats: “Yet I protest
that I do so only to obey you; and with such misgiving that you owe me more for
taking up my pen with all this fear. . . . But withal, it is well that this goes to meet
with your correction: erase it, tear it up, and chastise me.”66 In another instance, she
makes the most clear, direct defense of her particular case: “If my crime lies in the
‘Letter Worthy of Athena,’ was that anything more than a simple report of my opin¬
ion? ... If it is heretical, as the critic says, why does he not denounce it? Thus he
would find revenge and I contentment... for just as I was free to disagree with Vieira,
any person shall be free to disagree with my judgment.”67 But she then makes a dra-
108 NOT QUITE SINNERS

matic rhetorical retreat: “But where am I bound, my Lady? For none of this is per¬
tinent here, nor meant for your ears; instead, as I was speaking of my detractors, I
recalled the phrases of one such who has recently appeared, and all unwittingly my
pen strayed.”68 Nonetheless, this “slip of the pen” makes way for a clear petition:
“The study of sacred letters is not only permissible but most useful and necessary
for women, and all the more so for nuns.”69 The perfecta religiosa, she argues, can also
be a perfecta letrada. She closes by arguing that the Bible’s poetry proves that verse form
coexists with the sacred. Not surprisingly, this strong statement is quickly followed
by a conventional phrase about her humility.

No Me He Atrevido a Exceder de los Limites de Vuestro Estilo

These final paragraphs, the peroracion, return full force to the rhetorical posture of
the escritora por obediencia found in the exordio. As Sor Juana approaches the end of her
defense, she comes full circle—back to the problematic situation of the woman writer
who has taken a vow of obedience. Sor Juana concisely repeats, probably for the
reader’s sake, her own adherence to the virtues of the model nun, including humility
(“I confess straightway my rough and uncouth nature”), writing at the behest of others
(“I have never written a single thing of my own volition, but rather only in response
to the pleadings and commands of others”), ignorance, and suffering.70 She parallels
the opening allusion to Moses again: her writings were abandoned like the orphaned
prophet, but the comparison itself suggests a chosen status.
The final passage provides the key to reading the Respuesta in a confessional genre.
Like her convent sisters, Sor Juana will have to give “strict accounting” (estrecbtsima
cuentaj on judgment day, accounting for the use of her God-given talent, which her
version of the vida has attempted to justify. Sor Juana used the form of the vida not
only as a mask to cover her assertive response to cultural expectations for women
but also to make clear the dilemma of the seventeenth-century woman writer through
the use of the only culturally acceptable form for writing about the self that was then
available to religious women. In a baroque layering of forms and meanings, Sor Juana
simultaneously employs the genre and rejects it as inadequate, displaying the faulty
teachings about women that led to its conventions. She exposes the flaws of church
practices toward women and undermines the church’s precepts. No longer simply a
personal defense to a confessor found in her Carta al Padre Nunez, the Respuesta lays
claim to a much broader agenda: the justification of education for all who are so
gifted. Religious women could be experimentadas (mystics and visionaries) or letradas.
Hidden in the rhetoric of the vida form, Sor Juana has carved out a unique role for
herself in the church.

The Replies to the Reply: Sor Juana’s Final Years and Hagiography

How did the church deal with its famous, rebellious daughter upon her death, four
years after writing the Respuestal Recent work by several historians about Sor Juana’s
supporters and detractors in her final years of life enrich the familiar story of how
the church struggled to control the representation of its elite women.
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 109

For years, competing versions of the end of Sor Juana’s life have circulated. Irving
Leonard and Octavio Paz, for example, talk of the fury of some church fathers—
Nunez and Archbishop of Mexico Aguiar y Seijas, in particular—who exercised their
power over Sor Juana and forced her “conversion,’ a renunciation of her literary career
and a renewal of her vow to be a perfecta religiosa. More recent studies have radically
revised this dramatic story. Marie-Cecile Benassy-Berling, for example, demonstrates
that even after writing the Respuesta, Sor Juana continued to have Bishop Santa Cruz’s
support. For example, he approved Juana’s carols about the learned martyr Catherine
of Alexandria, an alternate canonized model for women. The female saint’s wisdom
conquered her male oppressors:

Catherine bears the victory!

For with knowledge pure and holy
she’s convinced the learned men
and has emerged victorious
—with her knowledge glorious—

Never by a famous man

have we been shown such victory,
and this, because God wished through her
to honor womankind.
! Victory!

Sacred tutor, patroness,

she shelters all our learning
that she who made of Sages, Saints,
new Sages may illumine.
Victory! Victory!71

Through the devotional vehicle of sacred carols, Sor Juana again took one of
Nunez’s pet projects, his own prologue to a book about Catherine, and reconfigured
its meaning.72 Other scholars have revealed how supporters worked from across the
Atlantic on Sor Juana’s behalf. As mentioned, in 1692 Sor Juana’s close friend the ex¬
vicereine, Condesa of Paredes, published in Seville the nun’s second collection of
works. The volume opened with a new edition of the Carta atenagorica and included
hundreds of changes, many of which emphasized further the most polemical aspects
of the original letter.73 Meanwhile, Sor Juana also wrote a satirical defense of her
literary pursuits, Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer.74 In fact, this work was commis¬
sioned by a group of Portuguese nuns who knew the Condesa of Paredes.
While it seems that Sor Juana and her supporters worked actively in the years
following the Respuesta, according to Elias Trabulse the initial storm caused by the Carta
atenagorica died down after several months. But early in 1693, the hiatus was broken by
the arrival from Spain of Sor Juana’s second volume of collected works in Mexico City.
It seems that Nunez and the archbishop may have been at work trying to contain their
rebellious daughter and her supporters. One of Sor Juana’s advocates, Erancisco Javier
no NOT QUITE SINNERS

Palavicmo, had preached a sermon in Sor Juana’s convent about the wisdom of the
“monja teologa.” When he tried to publish the sermon, he landed in the hands of the
Inquisition—perhaps because Nunez was still a censor for the Inquisition and signed
licenses for publication.75 (It is important to note, however, that the power of the In¬
quisition extended to Nunez himself: a recent study shows that several of his works
were censored as well.76) The documents based on this case reveal that Sor Juana’s name
was mentioned before the Inquisition.77 Ellas Trabulse argues that in these same years,
Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas initiated and pursued a secret case against Sor Juana her¬
self, the proceso espicopal secreto, which culminated in the 1694 sentencing of Sor Juana; she
was to “abjure all her errors, confess to being guilty, to make amends to the [Congre¬
gation] of the Most Holy Conception, not publish any further, and give over her li¬
brary and worldly goods to the archbishop.”78 The five documents of Sor Juana’s
so-called conversion, several supposedly signed in blood, emerged out of these efforts
to silence her. On paper, Sor Juana had renewed her vows, accepting the role of the
perfecta religiosa, and returned to Nunez as her spiritual director. While nothing else was
published in the remaining year or so of Sor Juana’s life, and her library and scientific
instruments were sold, these measures taken by the church did not effect a total renun¬
ciation of her literary and intellectual career as the archbishop and Nunez had hoped.
A recent archival find, a copy of an inventory of Sor Juana’s cell taken upon her death
(which is still in the process of being authenticated), reveals that she may have had
several manuscripts with writings and had begun to acquire another library.79 This would
support what we already know of Sor Juana’s continued literary activity with her com¬
position of the villancicos, romances, and Los enigmas.
Clearly, the traditional portrait of Sor Juana as submitting to clerical pressure
or undergoing a radical religious conversion is in question. As we might imagine from
studying other cases about religious women and the church’s rescripting of their lives,
this hagiographic version of her story began with clerical control of information and
posthumous publications about Sor Juana’s life. Immediately upon Sor Juana’s death
in 1695, Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas began to manipulate the release of information
about Mexico’s famous nun. Just as biographers selected, edited, and interpreted the
lives of Rosa, Marfa de San Jose, and Catarina de San Juan for official church ends,
the archbishop began the hagiographic process for Sor Juana. First, as Elias Trabulse
notes, Aguiar y Seijas silenced the sentencing of Sor Juana and halted the Inquisition
proceedings against her supporters.80 Next, he began the all-important textual rep¬
resentation and dissemination of Sor Juana’s life story. Within months of Sor Juana’s
death, the archbishop published the Protesta de lafe that Sor Juana had signed while
other testimonies were sent to Spain to be published in the third volume of Sor Juana’s
collected works—Fama y obras postumas.
Outwardly promoting this literary nun, Fama actually distorts Sor Juana’s life
and works. According to Trabulse, only 14 of 356 pages contain secular verse, and
neither the Enigmas nor anything from the manuscript writings found in her cell were
included.81 The opening portrait of Fama graphically illustrates the reconfiguration
of an independent woman who loved to study into an icon of a holy nun who sym¬
bolized America’s contribution to culture (see figures 4.1 and 4.2). Unlike the popu¬
lar eighteenth-century portrait by Cabrera, which portrays Sor Juana as an author in
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in

Figure 4.1 Oil portrait of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz by Miguel Cabrera, 1750
(Courtesy of the Institute Nacional de Antropologfa e Historia, Mexico)

her book-filled study, the Fama engraving displays a bust of Sor Juana as a generic
nun with a pen in hand. The bust is framed by a European conqueror on the one
side and a Native American on the other. Underneath are the iconographic symbols
of her knowledge—medicine, music, philosophy—aimed at boasting of America’s
cultural parity with Europe. The inclusion of the royal coat of arms clearly claims
Sor Juana as part of the Spanish Empire.
 LVROFA
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Figure 4.2 W oodcut of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, in the edition of her Fama y obras,
1700 (Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana)
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

The extensive prefatory pages, licenses, laudatory poems, and first vida of Sor
Juana by the Jesuit Diego de Calleja bespeak the official nature of the Fama. The
hagiographic vida, as we have seen in previous chapters, was perhaps the most impor¬
tant vehicle for promoting a ' canonized’’ version of an influential person’s life. After
describing his subject as the life of that rare woman, born into this world in order
to justify the vanities of prodigy to nature,”82 Calleja refocuses the story of Sor Juana’s
life. He misrepresents Sor Juana’s birth status, depicting her as the daughter of a
married couple. He repeats Sor Juana’s own myth-making process and says her first
writings were devotional pieces. Later, he echoes Sor Juana’s own language, the ‘‘in¬
clination to study books.” Significantly, however, Calleja retells the story, deliber¬
ately leaving aside the “contradictions” caused by the Carta Atenagorica, although he
mentions that it is a brilliant scholastic critique. Indeed, Calleja neutralizes the in¬
fluence of Sor Juana’s Carta atenagorica and Respuesta by emphasizing her humility:

See in this admirable woman a humility of such circumspect simplicity that

Whoever would see a full reply to the objections of those who take mere
apprehension for fully rendered judgment . . . herein will see that Madre
Juana Inez did not intend this piece of writing to be widely known. . . herein
will see that the response the poetess gave to Padre Vieira rendered him
more illustrious than did the defense of one who paints the snow [i.e., to
try to improve on its beauty]. . . and herein, finally, she did not fail to make
amends for her own offense.83

Calleja creates an obedient nun by highlighting the fact that even as Sor Juana was a
rara muger of stunning intelligence, she still is one of the church’s own humble perfectas
religiosas. He transforms Sor Juana’s vexed interactions with clergy into a life story
that is not so different in tone and ideology from other vidas.
Another contemporary biographical account of Sor Juana was embedded into
the biography of Nunez by Juan Oviedo. Not surprisingly, he applies his own
hagiographic style to Sor Juana’s life.84 He paints the portrait of a nun whose only
desire was to flee from her intellect:

So far was this lady from wanting or desiring these extraordinary favors
from God that she would tremble and be horrified by their mere recollec¬
tion, and did so judging herself unworthy and incapable of them all, as
though she feared the risk and danger they entailed, of which so many
Icaruses have been the frightening example. . . . She immediately pleaded
with God to free her from this way [and] lead her only on the sure path of
suffering, aided by the most living faith, firmest hope and burning love.85

Tin very words that Sor Juana used with ironic intent, to critique church prescrip¬
tions for women, were later used by Oviedo at face value, in order to portray her as
a model nun. Whereas Sor Juana deliberately marginalized the role of the confessor
in her writings and defended her right to use her God-given talent to write and to
interpret God’s will, the New Spanish Church resumed its role as mediator by rein¬
terpreting her life using hagiographic conventions and by publishing works that echoed
114 NOT QUITE SINNERS

official discourse. Sor Juana’s most published works in eighteenth-century New Spain
were her devotional exercises.
In the archbishop’s hands, Sor Juana’s life became a vehicle for promoting his
reforms of religious life for women in Mexico City. His manipulation of the Fama
and Calleja’s vida demonstrate how hagiographic and devotional works were often
used to settle questions of power. In 1692, as Antonio Rubial notes, Aguiar y Seijas
had signed an edict to enforce the vow of enclosure for nuns by limiting contact of
any kind with the outside world. Perhaps Sor Juana was to be a scapegoat and exem¬
plary lesson. A nun who had written secular drama and entertained court members
and professors at the convent grate was now a repentant obedient spiritual daughter,
signing in blood her religious vows to withdraw from the world. As with Rosa de
Lima and Catarina de San Juan, Sor Juana’s life story highlights how the interpreta¬
tion of church rules could change and, therefore, affect the destiny of individual lives
and the representation of those life stories. Once again, we see that the church’s re-
,sponse to questions of sanctity, heresy, or behavior of nonmystics was not unilateral
or unidirectional (i.e., controlled by Spain). Court and~churcTTmemE^rkTiTSpam
supported Sor Juana’s literary production, while some members of the New Spanish
clergy sought to limit it. A famous bride of Christ, like Sor Juana, fueled the debate
over the role of the church’s most gifted individuals. Hagiographic rescripting and
publishing were part of a larger political process of reinforcing ideal behavior.
Besides the church’s redefinition of Sor Juana’s life, the hyperbolic titles bestowed
on the nun during her own lifetime solidified soon after her death and became part
of the broader colonizing process of America. Just as the hagiography of Rosa de
Lima had elevated her to patron of America, Sor Juana became known as America’s
Tenth Muse (reference to Plato’s title for Sappho of Lesbos) and a rara avis, a Phoe¬
nix and an Icarus-like figure. As Margo Glantz reveals in her study, Sor Juana’s own
self-portrait as an insatiable intellect was maintained by her friend and fellow intel¬
lectual, Carlos de Sigtienza y Gongora who called her “learned” (docta), but others
claimed her for purposes linked to the process of building criollo identity in the mid¬
colonial period.86 Sor Juana helped put America on the map, as an equal power to
Europe. One poet of the period explains how, like Christopher Columbus, Sor Juana
became an icon for America, a genius-nun who represented America.87 Even a late-
eighteenth-century convent history written by nuns eulogizes Sor Juana in this man¬
ner: “This southern America, so famous for its rich minerals, can take pride in having
been the homeland of such a heroic woman that we may give her the epithet of the
strong woman.”88
When compared to the religious women studied in part I of this volume, Sor
Juana symbolized for her contemporaries an expanded role for religious women, a
role that went beyond aiding in the redemption of America. In spite of church ef¬
forts to make Sor Juana a perfecta religiosa, she represented the possibility of a more
multivalent role for women and individuals. Besides writing about the role of women
in colonial society, Sor Juana also briefly touched on indigenous beliefs in a Loa and
imitated popular African-Hispanic dialects in some popular poetic pieces.89 Because
of the range of voices in Sor Juana s writings, she was used to champion many causes.
No doubt this fact helps account for Sor Juana’s immense popularity in recent years
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 115

in Mexico; she has moved symbolically out of her ex-cloister (now a center for higher
education) into the national press, movies, and plays, and she has increased in value
from being portrayed on the old 1 peso coin to the 200 peso bill. Like Rosa de Lima
in the Andes and Catarina de San Juan in Puebla, Sor Juana has become a contempo¬
rary symbol for Mexico’s identity.
In the traditional story of Sor Juana’s dramatic end, official church politics won
out over a more authentic representation of a religious woman and poet. The num¬
bers and ranks of officials involved in Sor Juana’s final years and the years immedi¬
ately following her death show the critical importance of controlling access to and
reinterpreting the lives of the church’s brides. The effectiveness of this official revi¬
sion of Sor Juana’s final years is clear from the hundreds of years that it endured.
But the clarity and startling freshness of Sor Juana’s own voice in her verse, drama,
and letters rings out in her published texts and ensures that her voice is not lost.
Remarkably unmuddled and free of the ambiguity that often characterized nuns'
writing as they walked the tenuous line between self, cleric, and God—and the insti¬
tutionalization of the meaning of that relationship—Sor Juana’s letters wittily ex¬
ploit the full range of arguments, texts, and genres available to her.

Chronology of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

1648/1651 Born Juana Ines Ramirez y Asbaje in Nepantla, Mexico.

1654 Attends an amiga school.
1658 Composes her first known poem (a religious loo).
1661 Moves to Mexico City to live with relatives.
1664 Becomes a lady-in-waiting to the vicereine, the marquise de Mancera.
1666 Enters and leaves the Carmelite Convent.
1669 Enters the Hieronymite Convent of Santa Paula, Mexico City.
ca. 1682 Writes letter to Padre Antonio Nunez de Miranda, breaking with
him as her confessor.
1689 Inundacion castdlida1, Sor Juana’s first collected works, published in
Madrid.
1690 Carta atenagorica published in Puebla by Bishop Fernandez de Santa
Cruz.
1691 Drafts La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz.
1692 Obras, the second collection of Sor Juana’s works, published in Seville.
1693 Possible proceso arzobispal secreto against Sor Juana.
1693 Signs her general confession.
1694 Signs a declaration of faith and gives away her library.
1695 Dies in an epidemic.
1700 Famay obras posthumas, a third collection of Sor Juana’s works, pub¬
lished in Madrid. The edition includes Diego Calleja’s Vida of Sor
Juana in the prefatory material.
 \

The Happy Saint

Ursula Suarez (1666-/749)—Rogues and New Saintly Roles

I haven’t yet had a comedienne saint, and as there are all manner oj things in palaces,
you are to be the comedienne.
—God speaking to Ursula, Relacion, 230

[put St. Paul’s words in you because I want you to preach as he did.
—God speaking to Ursula, Relacion, 202

Don’t talk to me in Latin, don’t mention St. Paul to me, and don’t quote the Bible to me.
—Bishop Romero talking to Ursula, Relacion, 262

T he voice of Ursula Suarez, a Chilean colonial nun, rings out with startling fresh¬
ness in her autobiographical account. Whereas Sor Juana describes the inequality
of male-female relationships, Ursula records in her Relacion autobiografica how she wit¬
tily pushed the limits of women’s roles—often at men’s expense. In a famous scene
from one of Sor Juana’s plays, a male comic servant (gracioso) cross-dresses and makes
fun of men’s attitudes toward women.1 Ursula did this in real life by dressing a young
mulatto slave as a woman in order to dupe male patrons of the convent:

I dressed the convent mulatto as a nun, taking him to the turn and the
locutory where the men were, so that he should enter behind me and cap¬
tivate a few of them; and he did this with such flair that I died laughing, all
the more so when they asked for his little hand and the mulatto brought it
out, all covered with calluses; and they were so smitten that they never
noticed how rough and large it was. Anyway, they would give him their
coins and powder boxes and the mulatto was so wild that once he had
grabbed the money he would scratch their hands, having been talking in
falsetto with a thousand breaks in his voice, me at his side, just like the
devil. The convent provisora [Ursula] would spend her time in these activi¬
ties; would that she did not have this office, was she to be so perverse.2

With behavior hardly befitting a nun, Ursula often used tricks and ruses to bring
economic benefit to the convent. The nun boasts that she was to be a different sort
of saint, one who brings in money to the community: “I will work miracles, and they

116
 Ursula Suarez 117

are to pay for them. Have you ever seen male or female saints out for a profit? I will
be one of the latter, for if I heal the sick or restore sight to the blind, they will have
to come and serve the convent and you [the other nuns] will reap the benefits while
I do the work: they will be tormenting me, and I must be a happy saint.”3 Clearly,
Ursula had a different interpretation of God’s plan than Rosa de Lima or Marfa de
San Jose. Although her text draws on canonized vida authors, such as Augustine,
Teresa, and the Clarist nun of her own order, Marfa de la Antigua, the tone and
purpose are significantly altered. Ursula's dialogues with God and confessor re¬
veal her nonconformist path. As we see in the opening quote to this chapter, God
spoke directly to Ursula: ‘‘you are to be the comedienne.”4 Her role, as God re¬
minds her more than once, was to be a happy saint (santa alegre) and to use her voice
to preach like St. Paul.5 Finances, laughter, and preaching all mix together in the
nun’s unusual vida.
Ursula’s confessional narrative structure parallels those of her convent sisters
while also introducing more secular concerns. From an early age the girl felt a spe¬
cial calling, and she fought family obstacles to pursue it, until finally she entered the
convent. To this point, hers is a traditional story of religious vocation. Ursula em¬
ploys the conventional language and narrative voice of a nun writing under obedi¬
ence to her confessor. But the Clarist nun also records unexpected reactions to the
religious life: she is horrified that nuns often practiced mortification even while sleep¬
ing, laughs at the “inward light” of God’s presence, and flirts with male suitors and
clergy. Rather than tell a typical tale of true religious conversion, of turning toward
God and demonstrating increased humility and charity, Ursula delights in recalling
her pranks at home and in the convent. Later, a profound experience of God’s pres¬
ence helps Ursula leave behind her pranks and embrace the difficulties of living in a
religious community. Yet her transformation remains firmly grounded in the world
around her. Her later notebooks talk of suffering conflict and illness and hearing
divine locutions, but instead of responding with prayer and increased humility (the
camino de perfection), Ursula often insists on a playful verbal response.
In a lively style of writing Ursula incorporates ballad and verse forms, folkloric
elements, and extensive dramatic dialogue into her prose to recount her journey to
become God’s first “comedienne samt” (santa comedianta'). Borrowing elements from
popular period theatre and the picaresque novel, she expands the parts nuns could
literally and figuratively play in God’s and the church’s production of female saints.
By intertwining elements from secular literary genres with the confessional didactic
possibilities of the vida, Ursula expands the form and ideology of confessional litera¬
ture. Through these literary genre crossovers, she critiques secular and religious
women’s economic dependence on men and the church’s models for female sanctity.
In the process she creates an alternate “autohagiographical” narrative.
How did a nun who resisted traditional roles for women come to write a con¬
fessional account with so many secular overtones? How did the Catholic Church
respond to it? Although there are still many gaps in what we know of Ursula’s life
and writings, the scholars who published her account for the first time in 1984 pro¬
vide some guideposts. In 1708, Ursula was commanded by her confessor to rewrite
her vida because, as in the cases of Teresa and Marfa de San Jose, the first draft re-
Il8 NOT QUITE SINNERS

portedly had been burned. This second version consists of at least the first eight
notebooks of the Relation autobiografica.6 (See figure 5.1.) Written about 1708—1710 as a
single narrative unit, these notebooks recount Ursula’s call to the religious life and
the first decades in the convent, leading up to the narration of her spiritual experience
(1666 to ca. 1694).7 The remaining six notebooks (9—14), are cuentas de conciencia, dis¬
crete narrative units that relate specific events, most often, conflicts, illness and dia¬
logues with God.8 These notebooks were composed at various times and addressed
to several different readers between 1708 and 1730—1732. (Some may be revisions of
earlier notebooks.) We do not know how this group of writings came to be bound
with the vida, but in general they relate incidents from 1694 to 1715.9
No hagiographic biography or funeral sermon was published upon Ursula’s death.
Although she had risen to the rank of abbess and had powerful contacts with Jesuit
confessors and several bishops during her seven decades in the cloister, Ursula was not
posthumously promoted by the Catholic Church—unlike Rosa de Lima, Catarina de
San Juan, and Marfa de San Jose. Even Sor Juana, the rebellious intellectual who was
forced to sell her library in her final years, was promoted as one of the church’s model
daughters. Clearly, Ursula's life was unusual enough to require a confessional vida, but
was it too unconventional to become the subject of a biography?
In the small but growing scholarship on Ursula’s account are references to its
tone of roguishness and the seeming rejection of the model nun. Rodrigo Canovas
notes the influence on Ursula’s account of a mercantile society caught between writ¬
ing as sacred and writing as profane; Soma Montecinos also notes a shift between
the transcendental and the quotidian. In more feminist studies, Andriana Valdes
describes the “double authority” of confessor and God, and Marfa Ines Lagos ar¬
gues that the text shuttles between Ursula’s narcissism and the symbolic order, rep¬
resented by the confessor. Both Kristin Routt and Kristine Ibsen link Ursula’s use of
humor with her definition of sanctity: Routt describes the inversion of mystic desire
and language in order to create a model nun who entertained God, and Ibsen high¬
lights Ursula’s borrowing of two character types from period theatre (comedia), the
manly woman (mujer varonil) who defies society’s conventions for women and the
clown (graciosa), a point we will return to later.10 I will build on this scholarship but
redirect its focus to examine the fundamental role of literary genres and ideologies
in Ursula’s critique of church and society and how these structure her self-portrait
as a roguish saint. Before delving into literary types and portraits, it is useful to know
more about Ursula’s life in colonial Chile.

Ursula Suarez and Chilean Society

Ursula was well-positioned in the elite criollo society of colonial Santiago de Chile.
She was born in 1666 to Francisco Suarez del Campo and Marfa de Escobar Lillo;
while the maternal side of her family still enjoyed social prestige as direct descen¬
dants of conquistadors, her paternal relatives were well-off merchants and bureau¬
crats.11 Both sides of the family, however, were experiencing a relative decline by the
latter half of the seventeenth century, as the initial spoils of conquests and coloniza¬
tion decreased significantly. This economic and social decline strongly influenced
 Ursula Suarez 119

Ursula s upbringing. Although Ursula’s mother brought a prestigious name to the

marriage, her lack of economic resources led to a tense relationship with her mother-
in-law. Wedded without a dowry, and therefore with no belongings of her own, Maria
used Ursula as a go-between to obtain household items from her husband’s rich
mother.1'- Living in a household with four adults, one sister, and many servants and
slaves, Ursula talks of endless domestic conflict over financial concerns.13
Like many criolla girls of good birth, Ursula was trained from an early age to
marry well and run a large household. In her Relation, the nun reveals some details of
her training and education. At age six, Ursula moved temporarily to an aunt’s house,
where she received lessons in reading, accounting, and needlework. Skilled at read¬
ing and memorizing books, Ursula spent hours impressing her relatives by reciting
passages from memory. Later, like Sor Juana, she received more education at her
grandfather’s house. Although it is difficult to reconstruct the depth of Ursula’s learn¬
ing, she learned some African dialect, kept financial records for the convent, and taught
her convent sisters Latin.14 The Relation itself reflects a good ear for language and
story-telling, and has some Latin phrases (although words are often misspelled).
While Ursula’s mother fought hard to prepare the girl for a good marriage that
might benefit the family, Ursula herself rebelled and countered her mother’s efforts
at every turn. Ursula had decided to become a nun. She recounts in an almost pa-
rodic style her first attraction to the convent: after suffering an illness, a servant car¬
ried Ursula to a convent. Upon nearing the building, the girl’s skin tingled and a
sweet aroma overwhelmed her. While the servant scolded Ursula for her nonsense,
the nuns “praised her wit.” Perhaps a literal reference to the sweets that convents
often made, the passage also echoes hagiographic tradition, which equates “a sweet
scent” emanating from convents and corpses as a sign of holiness.15 This call to the
religious life and complete antipathy toward marriage led to years of domestic struggle,
a struggle reminiscent of the one between Rosa de Lima and her mother. Ursula
worked hard to convert her mother to her cause, and one uncle helped Ursula, de¬
spite her often mischievous behavior.
These years at home were not filled with devotional practices, however. Instead
of reading devotional works as Rosa and Maria de San Jose had, Ursula confesses to
reading secular material voraciously, especially entertaining stories, novels, and plays.
She admits to reading only the dramatic, tragic saints’ lives: “If I picked up a book
it was for entertainment and not for benefitting from it; and I looked for ones on
history or tales, novels or comedies. . . . Back then during my novitiate I also read a
little Scripture and also saints’ lives, though if they were not tragic, I left them.”16
Rather than begin a rigorous schedule of prayer and penitential acts, the girl began
to deceive men: “I formulated the intention of never letting an opportunity go by in
which I would not attempt to deceive as many [men] as my ability would allow, and
this with due payment as though God in this present state were rendering a very good
service.”17 She was horrified at the treatment of women, particularly the way some
men lied to women and considered them objects of economic exchange.
Finally, in 1678 at age twelve, Ursula overcame her mother’s opposition and
entered the newly opened Clarist Convent de la Plaza, which her paternal grandfa¬
ther had founded by leaving dowries for thirty women.18 She lived there until her
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 Ursula Suarez izi

death at age 83. The third convent to be established in Santiago (but soon followed
by one more), the Clarist Convent was integral to Santiago society. Located on the
central plaza where festivals and civil ceremonies took place, the convent had little
in common with small, reformed orders like Marfa de San Jose’s. More in keeping
with Sor Juana’s convent, nuns were allowed to own their own "cells,” which actu¬
ally were more like small houses. By 1738, the convent itself owned and rented out
some twenty-six stores (tiendas) and four years later was building twelve more.19 At
one point the convent housed about five hundred women (only about sixty were
professed nuns). In some respects it resembled a small walled town within the rela¬
tively provincial city of Santiago, which had a total population of twelve to fifteen
thousand inhabitants.20
In theory Ursula became dead to the world upon entering the cloister, but in prac¬
tice she brought much of her life with her. Ursula did not have to part completely
with family: seven other relatives, including cousins and an aunt, entered the convent
with her.21 Because Ursula was not of age to take the veil yet, she spent five years in the
noviciate, of which she complained: "There was never a stricter novitiate, as we had a
teacher who was very upright and of a severe temperament, who had us locked up all
day long in a small cell into which thirty novices could barely fit, as this cell had nei¬
ther a yard nor a garden.”22 Within twelve years of her entrance, Ursula owned a house
(,celda) and garden within the convent compound. In some years it housed as many as
eleven women, ranging from a small toddler to servants and several women who lived
with Ursula nearly thirty years.23 Although she had taken a vow of poverty, the inter¬
pretation of it was obviously quite lax since she talks of amassing luxury items through
the generosity of her devotos. These were men who visited nuns and, in return for the
nun’s attentions, donated money to the convent. They bought her silver platformed
shoes, dresses, and even helped pay for remodeling her cell.24 According to period ac¬
counts, the vow of enclosure was not strictly enforced until the early eighteenth cen¬
tury. Although nuns could not leave the convent, they had a good deal of contact with
the world outside the convent through the comings and goings of family members,
priests, servants, and devotos.25 Along with an active life and a high economic status within
the convent, Ursula also had powerful ties to influential clerics outside the convent,
including several bishops and a host of Jesuit priests.26
Ursula’s privileged status is particularly clear from the positions she held in the
convent and the conflicts over power. Some time during her years as a novice (1678—
1684), she became a teacher. When she was old enough to profess her vows six years
later at age 18, Ursula took on roles with more responsibility: first, she controlled
the inventory of supplies and access to the convent as provisora; later, in 1687, she helped
the abbess control the dissemination of information to and from the convent as
definadora.17 Ambitious in her goals, Ursula attempted to become abbess several de¬
cades later, in 1710, but failed to gain the bishop’s support and was appointed second-
in-command as vicaria, in spite of having won the convent vote.28 One of her confessor’s
sisters, in fact, had been named instead (Marfa de Ga|nboa).29 For more than a de¬
cade the convent split into two camps over issues dr governance.
Directly connected to the conflict between the new abbess, the bishop, and her¬
self—and after a second defeat in her bid to become abbess—in 1715 Ursula was
122 NOT QUITE SINNERS

sentenced to a severe punishment. The Ecclesiastical Tribunal of Santiago and Bishop

Juan Francisco de Romero, at one time Ursula's close ally, confirmed the abbess’
and her supporters’ accusations that Ursula had been an instigator of upheaval in the
convent. Like the archbishop’s case against Sor Juana, the punishment was aimed at
breaking Ursula’s spirit: the sentence called for public humiliation by imposing cor¬
poreal punishment, solitary confinement for nine days, and the severest punishment
of all—the suspension of the privilege of receiving the sacrament of holy commun¬
ion for months. Ursula herself summarizes the sentence:

This was the drift of the sentence [meted out] to dona Ursula Suarez:
because she incited the convent and was disrespectful and disobedient to
the abbesses, causing disturbances and enraging the nuns, not allowing them
to speak because they had not elected her abbess and prelate, and for so
many offenses and rebellions His Illustrious Lordship ordered that I be
whipped in turn; of the assembled community each one was to whip me,
and later I was to kiss the feet of all the nuns, and eat on the ground, and
be shut in my cell without leaving it; and this was to be done for nine days,
that His Lordship had decided and ordered it in the presence of his no¬
tary, and had signed it thus.30

Ursula’s Relation closes with this story of being punished and developing an ill¬
ness in which she began to bleed at the mouth (notebook 14). The account’s final
note emphasizes how she humbled herself to clergy. When Ursula recounted a dream
about a bloody serpent to her confessor, he argued with her about the interpretation
of the dream. Ursula reacted by choosing to remain silent: “I was silent and fought
it no more.”31 Although the account ends on this note, Ursula refers to her promo¬
tion to abbess some six years later. With the help of a new bishop, she served as
abbess from 1721 to 1725. Only one passage briefly points to the fact that Ursula ended
up as abbess five years later with the full support of a new bishop. In the eleventh
notebook, as she talks of the time the convent election was undermined when Bishop
Romero appointed a different abbess, Ursula states: “Eleven years before I was elected
abbess, His Majesty told me: “I will favor your convent if you will govern it.”32 Ursula
goes on to state how she had held all the major governing positions in the convent,
except teacher of novices, which she turned down on three separate occasions.
Ursula highlights the role of divine will in her administrative roles, but she si¬
multaneously demonstrates a willfulness in her choice of convent duties. According
to Ursula’s twentieth-century editor, these last notebooks correspond to the final
two periods in which Ursula wrote, 1726 and circa 1730—1732—both after her tenure
as abbess. Indeed, a remark at one point in the manuscript dates Ursula’s final revi¬
sions to her account as having been made about 1730, but there is little mention of
the years in between the bishop’s sentence and finishing her account (1715 to 1730—
1732).33 Even less is known about the last two decades of Ursula’s life. A period
chronicle states: “Mother Ursula Suarez died on October 5 of the year 1749. Upon
her death several particular items were found, such as a paper on which she took
notes, which has been left in this.”34 But no other records found to date tell us much
about Ursula’s final years.
 Ursula Suarez 123

No doubt this is another case in which more clues may still lie in archives.35 As
a full-fledged nun for six decades, and particularly as an abbess, Ursula surely wrote
many letters. As a high-spirited daughter of several Jesuit confessors—the order that
promoted self-examination through confessional accounts—Ursula probably wrote
more autobiographical notebooks than the ones published in the Relacion. For now,
however, we can only examine the shaping of a self-portrait within what I refer to as
the formal vida (notebooks 1—8) and the extant cuentas de conciencia (notebooks 9—14),
and ask why these notebooks were put together and saved.

New Scripts: Nun, Picara, and Comedianta

The formal vida of the pecadora (sinner) turned predicadora (preacher) and santa alegre
begins in the initial eight notebooks written for Ursula’s Jesuit confessor Tomas
de Gamboa (1649—1729).36 Recounting her childhood call to the religious life and
its culmination with a religious experience as a nun (ca. 1694), which took place
fourteen years before the moment of writing, Ursula frames the information within
the vida conventions. But a clear counternarrative to the traditional vida—a story
of transgression akin to that of the picara, the roguish central character found
in popular picaresque novels of the period—dominates the first four notebooks.
She delights in telling the mostly not-so-holy stories about her upbringing and
novitiate.
By the fifth notebook, which corresponds to the period after Ursula confesses
as a full-fledged nun, recognizable elements of a conversion experience begin to come
through the narrative, albeit unevenly. While expressing remorse for her ruses and a
desire to follow St. Teresa (“It seems from that day forward, I was to be like St.
Teresa”), in a path of prayer, confessional writing, and visions, Ursula reveals a por¬
trait that flies in the face of Teresian sanctity.37 She flees from supernatural visions
and tries to ignore God’s words. And her inability to remain in prayer provoked laugh¬
ter when she announced it to her convent sisters:

I said to the others: “How can you have a long prayer when I run out?”
They all laughed, saying, “How does it run out?” and I told them “I don’t
understand this very well: I have it in my memory, but I can’t do a thing
with it;” they said: “You’ll get enjoyment out of other things;” I told them:
“That isn’t it; I'm trying to explain the point”; and they laughed at that,
too. But at times my prayer was full of anger.38

At a narrative level, when about to describe her deep spiritual experience, Ursula
abruptly returns to telling roguish stories about getting money from devotos (most of
notebook 6).
Ursula had both a family of good social standing and, later, a place in the convent
as a professed nun. Yet, ironically, she plays up the fact that, whether with her family
or her convent sisters, she had to rely on her natural cleverness to help those around
her obtain food, shelter, or clothing. Even as a bride of Christ, she used her feminine
wiles with devotos de monjas and an occasional bishop to help maintain the convent. In a
picaresque reworking of the hagiographic stories of saints who ignored threats from
124 NOT QUITE SINNERS

husbands or fathers in order to distribute food to the poor, Ursula secured food for
her family and sisters and, at least until notebook 8, delighted in the verbal games she
had to play to accomplish her task. Without ever using the word picara—but employ¬
ing most of its possible synonyms: embustera (liar), callejera (roamer), bellaca (rogue), traviesa
(mischevious), etc.—the Clarist nun depicts herself as a proud “saintly rogue,” who
retaliates against men and as a santa comedianta, a holy actress who plays the comic part
of a new type of saint, often in order to criticize society.39
A closer look at the popularity of period theatre, the picaresque novel, and the
character types of both of them helps reveal Ursula's careful blending of literary and
dramatic elements to create a new type of nun. Theatre was a popular vehicle for
telling the dramatic lives of the saints, and unreformed convents (like Ursula’s) often
had performances of plays within the cloister.40 The most compelling evidence of
the influence of theatre in Ursula’s account is, as mentioned, her announcement that
God wanted an actress among his saints. In terms of theatrical role playing per se,
there are only two incidents in Ursula’s narrative: at age six she dresses up as a grown
woman in order to dupe a suitor, and later she cross-dresses a slave whom she uses in
order to deceive a devoto. Nonetheless, Kristine Ibsen suggests that Ursula rejects the
paradigm of the penitential female saint and creates a role reminiscent of two theat¬
rical character types, the manly woman (mujer varonil) and the comic (graciosa). Ibsen
sees the mujer varonil as central to Ursula’s narrative because the nun rebels against
society, but Ibsen does not account for the nun’s relentless use of her femininity to
achieve her ends.41 The graciosa, the comic foil, in contrast, was from the servant class
and often carried out deceptions that reflect a street-wise manipulator, often moti¬
vated by economic concern. Notably, the graciosa s role often blends with that of the
picara: both tend to use their feminine wiles for economic gain. While Ursula’s nar¬
rative presents suggestive parallels with character types from theatre, the fundamen¬
tal narrative structure and ideology of the first eight notebooks draw heavily on
elements from the rogue’s tale.
In this regard, the classical picaresque genre is more fundamental to the study
of Ursula’s account than is period theatre. The picaresque novel incorporated many
components of literary and folk traditions to create a countergenre to popular ide¬
alized literature of the early modern period. Critics have pointed to an occasional
anecdotal roguish element in other nuns’ vidas, but rarely to any fundamental struc¬
turing or linguistic modeling on the picaresque form.42 The connection between the
picaresque tale and the vida, however, is closely linked: both may have emerged as a
response to Inquisition testimony and its use of confessional and juridical narratives,
as Carmen Rabell suggests in her study of the first known picaresque novel, Lazarillo
de Tormes (1554).43 Written a decade before Teresa’s Vida, the anonymous author of
Lazarillo de Tormes casts the prologue as a confession by the rogue-protagonist to a
superior in order to justify his life. Likewise Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Aljaracbe (1599)
tells the story of a repentant rogue who reports his delinquent adventures and in¬
tersperses them with didactic passages about conversion and confession.44 And the
blending of literary genre is obvious in the Libro de entretenimiento de la picara Justina (1605),
in which the protagonist laments that very few people read vidas and talks about having
been a holy woman for a short while; still she ends up delighting in her ruses and
 Ursula Suarez 125

marrying the picaro Guzman de Alfarache.45 No moral is put forth (as the title dem¬
onstrates), and the conversion she promises never materializes. Thus, the picaresque
narrative uses confessional literature as a formal model, but deviates from its exhor¬
tation to virtue.46 The generic overlap implicitly or explicitly calls into question the
purpose of the confessional vida by using a fictional first person narrator who often
delights in the transgressive aspects of the tale.
But what is the effect of a literary crossover that comes from the other direc¬
tion—that is, a life story that inscribes itself into confessional literature with ele¬
ments of picaresque narrative? And why would a woman who was economically and
socially advantaged—both in her secular and convent life—choose to borrow the
rhetoric and themes of a genre that is traditionally associated with characters from
the lower classes?4' A closer look at Ursula’s use of the genre provides some clues.
At the base of both the vida and the picaresque narrative is the question of ori¬
gins and, often, the reality of financial problems (a dowry for nuns and making a
living for rogues). Appropriately enough, Ursula begins her story with her own ori¬
gins and role within the household economy. Rather than inscribing her birth and
upbringing within the traditional portrait of the ideal Christian family in which both
mother and father are exemplars of virtue, Ursula, in a more picaresque fashion,
suggests a certain illegitimacy in her upbringing and recounts her mother’s attempts
to use her as a go-between. Metaphorically orphaned as an infant because Ursula’s
mother was unable to breast-feed her daughter (and, therefore, instill her with the
virtue that only a mother’s pure milk could transmit), the autobiographer notes how
she was passed from one nurse (ama) to another. In all, she had ten amas and con¬
cludes that was the reason, “I turned out so bad.”48 Despite being spoiled by her
paternal grandmother, Ursula did not have a childhood; her family treated her “as
though I were a grownup” and early on she recognized the power of language: “I
was careful with what I said.”49
Cleverly manipulating her grandmother, the young girl acquired food and clothes
for her mother, who had married with no dowry and was completely dependent on
her in-law’s rare generosity for foodstuffs and clothing. When she saw her daughter’s
ability to extract things from the matriarch, she turned the young girl into a go-between
to better their economic situation:

On one occasion my mother began to complain that she had nothing on

which to subsist, and that my grandmother, who had so much wheat, would
not give her a bushel, and told me, “Tell her that, little one, so that your
grandmother will say that I grumble about her and that I am a daughter-
in-law.” I waited for an occasion to tell this to my grandmother, because
although I was very young—not even five years old—I was careful with
what I said. One day, when she had me in bed with her, I said, “Grand¬
mother, my poor mother has nothing on which to live, so why doesn’t Your
Grace give her something?” She replied, “Doesn’t she have three black slave
women? Why doesn’t she make them work? Why does she rent them out?
For I have told her that renting them out will make them sick, and your
mother won’t listen.” This is how she talked to me, as though I were a
126 NOT QUITE SINNERS

grownup. I said to her, “Give her wheat, and with that she will make her
bread.” “Did she tell you to say that?” “My mother talks to me,” I replied.
“Give her wheat.” I began to cry and complain to her, saying, “You see
how you don’t love me, Grandmother? Is this your kindness, refusing to
give me the keys to the pantry?” On I prattled, until she said, “Take the
key, miss; give her two bushels.” I went to my mother very content and
told her, “Let’s go to the pantry, for my grandmother will give you some
wheat now.” “Didn’t I tell you not to tell her? What shameless behavior!
Why did you tell your grandmother about it? No one can say a word with
you around.” I began to tremble, judging that she was going to whip me.
Then my aunt said to her: “Don’t be like that with your daughter, Marucha:
besides trying to save your life and provide you with something on which
to subsist, you are making this angel tremble, when you should be praising
her. Don’t be foolish with her, who is so generous and discreet.”50

The Clarist nun portrays her mother as a picaro’s master: the mother used Ursula to
get the basic necessities in life and repaid her daughter with threats (“I am going to
kill you”). Making contact with the confessional mode in which she is inscribing her
story, the autobiographer concludes that God had chosen her to be her mother’s
“instrument.”51
Some years after the grandmother died, Ursula’s mother began preparing her
daughter for marriage into a well-to-do family, hoping to assure the financial secu¬
rity of the whole family; ideally, Ursula would have access to her husband’s wealth
and would thus be the solution to the family’s problems. With this proposed mar¬
riage, the conflict between mother and daughter escalated because the young girl was
already set on being a nun, not a nun in a reformed, discalced order but a wealthy
nun with, as her grandmother had promised, riches from all over the viceroyalty of
Peru in her cell and slaves:

You will be a nun in all comfort if God sees fit to preserve me until you are
of age; no nun will be better installed than you, with your richly furnished
cell, very well hung display cabinets and tooled silver, brought from Peru,
paintings from Cuzco, and I will send to Lima to have made anything you
might need. You will have one female slave for inside and another outside,
and four thousand pesos income; this is on top of your inheritance, which
you will of course be given.52

Describing her mother as a “angry lioness,” Ursula says she became the “dog of the
house” once the grandmother died. Even though her father and uncle supported her
choice to be a nun, she had to fight tooth and nail with her mother to avoid becom¬
ing “dead” through marriage and sexual union with a man: “It occurred to me that
all women who married were dead.”53 Ursula draws on the a topic in nuns’ vidas, of
becoming “dead” to the secular world (and thus to her body as a source of sexuality)
and is ready to marytr herself rather than be taken by a man: “Well, should I consent
to be bedded with a man? I would as soon hang myself, or take a dagger and slit my
throat or run it through mv breast.”54 .

\
 Ursula Suarez 127

In contrast to her self-portrait as being marginalized by her mother and vowing

to remain chaste, Ursula reveals her concurrent interests in roaming the streets of
Santiago to watch illicit sexual acts. Reworking a tale from folklore, the nun recounts
searching for a magic wand (varilla) but ending up at the scene of a crime: the young
girl had stumbled across a house of prostitution, but in her childish innocence took
it to be weddings:55

I had heard tell of a magic wand, that by means of it you could work miracles.
I believed it and set out eagerly to look for this wand: I left home and fol¬
lowed a little irrigation stream that comes out from the Augustine convent,
and went very far down where the canal flowed swiftly and ran off into the
country. ... There were some empty rooms there with no doors where so
many shameless acts were committed that it was scandalous, as it was broad
day, and there were not just two people involved in these bad things, but
eight or ten; it was not a sight to be seen except by innocent eyes, who knew
not that they were committing a sin. I thought they were weddings, and so
I went daily to see them.56

When she reported the incident to her mother, Ursula was scolded for talking about
these “weddings,” so the girl deduced that there was no harm in watching them as
long as she did not talk about them. A far cry from saintly women’s narratives of
repugnance to sexuality, Ursula’s story talks of repeated interest in male-female re¬
lationships of all sorts.
Such a reworking of stories from folkloric tradition and the ironies produced
by the literal interpretation of her mother’s rules are reminiscent of elements found
in picaresque stories beginning with the Lazarillo de Tormes. Like Lazarillo, Ursula learns
at an early age the power of language—when to use it, and when to withhold it.
Moreover, there is a latent sense of sexual awakening in her self-portrait of a young
girl wanting to become a nun but being innocently curious about sexuality.
Ursula reveals that according to family lore, as a toddler she was stark naked in
the bath and playing at ringing convent bells when she announced she would be¬
come a nun:

I said to [my aunt]: “When I am big I will be the rose among thorns, for I
will be a nun.” She said to me: “You, a nun? So wicked and of such bad
blood, opponents of becoming nuns,” and I replied, “I, Aunt, will be the
crown of my generation:” Said she, “Quiet, imp, for your liveliness is not
for the likes of a nun, though when you were very little one day I was giv¬
ing you a bath in the middle of the patio and you frightened me, for, hold¬
ing you quite naked, [there you were] clutching my braids and you began
to ring them back and forth with great tempo, and imitated the sound of
the bells with your mouth. Frightened, I called your mother and said, “Kitty,
come and see your daughter who’s going to be a nun, look how she peals.”
My mother and all the other women came out to applaud your charm: I
don’t know what it was, because you are a great rascal.” I told her: “Aunt,
Your Grace will see that I will become a nun.”57
128 NOT QUITE SINNERS

Using the innocence of a child’s perspective and the words of others, Ursula
unites the good/bad woman dichotomy (“nun,” “naked”) so often found in period
manuals for women and creates a symbolic moment for her own identity.58 Nuns, as
Ursula herself later explains to a suitor, were meant to be asexual, nothing more than
“hands and faces,” their bodies being made of pure, cold, hard marble.59 And they
were to practice long hours of virtuous silence. Picaras, on the other hand, acknowl¬
edged their bodies, their sexuality, and the use of language; their survival depended
upon their verbal wit and sexual desirability.60 For much of Ursula’s life she was keenly
aware of her sexuality and wit, but innocently depicts it as an integral part of her
religious vocation.
Calling herself a roamer (callejera) and mischievous (traviesa), the Clarist nun goes
on to relate children’s pranks and other deceptions that she practiced at home—the
origin of a vice she continued in the convent. Overhearing a conversation between
her aunt and mother about a woman deceived by a man, the six-year-old vowed to
avenge dishonored women. Perhaps playing with the common literary theme of honor,
Ursula used her femininity to avenge women’s honor in general. But by invoking God’s
blessing in the narrative, she depicts herself as a saintly rogue (jpicara a lo divino) who
rights wrongs: “In conclusion, I formulated the intention of never letting an oppor¬
tunity go by in which I would not attempt to deceive as many [men] as my ability
would allow, and this with due payment as though God in this present state were
rendering a very good service; not four days went by that I did not comply with my
intention.”61
At age six Ursula begins to execute her vow to take revenge on men and takes
on her first victim. She begins her play-acting by making herself up to dupe a man:

After compline, it seemed to me a good opportunity to begin to deceive. I

went to my aunt’s box; like a monkey I began enthusiastically to dress myself
up, and said, “When [the women] show themselves in the window they are
all dressed up.” I got out the makeup and began to plaster it on without a
mirror and with very good color; I don’t know if I turned out a hideous
mask or not, because I paid no attention to that, but to the makeup I had
seen women use. ... I got out a mantilla . . . which would veil my face; I
arranged it very well so that one could see that I was white without know¬
ing that I was a child. I thus went to the window. .. . When I was already
seated I saw a man come from the direction of the plaza and said: “Thank
God, now I’ll deceive you.” This is what happened: the man came up to
the window and began to talk to me. I had no idea what he was saying nor
how to reply. . . . He asked for my hand; I realized that if he saw it he would
know thereby that I was a child. He got out a handful of silver and was
going to give it to me, and I got intimidated about his seeing my hand, not
by the money. Finally I said to him, “If you give me the money, put your
hand in the window”; I did that to make sure of it and be able to snatch it
from him; the handful of silver appeared as I had requested, and I gave his
hand a great slap and simultaneously dropped down from the window, with
one silver dollar which was the only thing I was able to snatch from him.
 Ursula Suarez

As soon as I was down I began to taunt him, telling him: “I have deceived
you, fool; such a great booby that you let yourself be deceived by me.” . . .
I closed the window quickly and went inside to clean up and wash my face
so that my aunt would not see me with the makeup.62

When the smitten man returned the next day, her disguise was revealed. Upon
seeing the young girl without makeup or a mantilla, the man exclaimed: “She must
be a saint or a very bad girl” (“ha de ser santa o gran mala”). Accordingly, the reader
is given two reactions: as in the story about getting wheat for her mother, the aunt
laughed and the mother wanted to whip Ursula as though she were a grownup. She
walks the fine line between saint and sinner, between nun and picara. Even the uncle
who convinced the mother to let her daughter enter the convent at a young age ar¬
gues that people are amused by her remarks and, more important, she would be
“weighed down by children and perhaps bored if she married.”63
As a nun, Ursula continues this duality as sinner-saint first established through
the words of others—the aunt and mother, the deceived man, and the uncle. When
other nuns saw the novice’s dismay at the relative poverty of the convent, “They looked
on my charm with pleasure, and said that I must be a great rascal and extremely
clever.”64 Shocked that walls were not painted and meals were served in clay pottery
rather than silver, she confessed: “At first I was displeased in the convent as I missed
the neatness of my home and not being able to eat from tooled silver [plates].”65
The silver from Potosf and the paintings from Cuzco that her grandmother had
predicted for her granddaughter’s life in the convent did not materialize. Ursula’s
desire for finery clearly was unfit behavior for a model nun, who would have dis¬
dained all worldly possessions and taken a vow of poverty—although as we saw in
Sor Juana’s case, the interpretation of this vow varied widely. While openly ques¬
tioning for the first time her reasons to become a nun, she refused to return home
and, like a model nun, took to heart the examples in Scripture of the prophets' dif¬
ficulties in leaving home.
This focus on the financial concerns of convent life ultimately provides one of
the richest areas of Ursula’s critique of women’s economic dependence on men, as
well as a newfound justification for carrying on her deceptions of them. In unreformed
convents, nuns relied heavily on special male patrons, devotos de monjas, who financed
many of the operating costs and individual needs of nuns in return for a particular
nun’s prayers and attention through visits to the locutory. Notably, the last note¬
book (6) before the story of her religious experience, is essentially a series of enter¬
taining anecdotes about these liaisons with devotos de monjas. Many nuns decried the
evils of the devoto system, while many male literary authors found it a rich area for
satire.66 Elsewhere, Ursula mentions how another nun’s life story, the Vida by Maria
de la Antigua, exposed the defects of the devoto system and implies that no action had
been taken to better the situation (230). In Ursula’s hands, she mixes a confessional
mode with accounts about her deceits and games to describe the crucial yet prob¬
lematic system of patronage. She relates in detail duping her devotos: promising to
marry one, getting another to buy her a house, playing off two men’s simultaneous
visits, telling another man of high social rank to kneel before her, and reprimanding
130 NOT QUITE SINNERS

yet another who wanted to hold her hand. She argues that the financial proceeds of
these encounters through the grille helped the convent: the devotos were the nuns
“stewards” (mayordomos, 181). Once again employing words of others to note play¬
fully the direct relationship between economic gain for all and being proclaimed a
saint, Ursula recalls that when one thankful old nun called Ursula a saint, she re¬
torted: “I say that, as she saw it, she foretold that not only would I be a great reli¬
gious but a saint, for this opinion was as good as canonization.”67 She combines the
worldly need (and in her case, desire) for material goods with the virtue of charity in
her self-portrait. Although she borrows aspects of the puara’s character, she attempts
to make herself—through the words of others—into an unconventional saint who
uses her ruses to benefit others.
But rather than highlight her chanty, Ursula delights in telling the transgressive
aspects of her tales, which undermines the confessional purpose of the account. Ursula
flaunts her manipulation of the devotos. In some cases she switches to a confessional
mode after telling about an incident (“The time came for confession and I made an
examination of so many bad deeds”),68 but in others there is no remorse for her de¬
ceit. After lying to one of her victims saying that she was planning to leave the con¬
vent, she describes his gullibility: “This man, well, was he not a fool to give credit to
such nonsense? For, seeing as how I was leaving the convent, should I have gone with
a married man, and all the more so as he knew my family and who I was? More fool
he to believe me, when he said that I seemed exceedingly perverse, that I showed
signs of the devil for having deceived him; they themselves say it and it falls upon
them; I now believe that they who have been deceived are devils to women.”69 Like
the picara Justina, Ursula inverted men’s own tricks, and like Sor Juana, she points
the guilty finger at men’s own folly.
These highly picaresque scenes nearly disappear from the narrative after note¬
book 8, after Ursula’s religious experience. In fact, notebooks 7 and 8 include all
the elements of a conversion experience found in other nuns’ vidas. Preparing for a
general confession, Ursula says she experienced a series of vuelos and interior light,
followed by feeling such deep remorse for her sins and recognition of her unwor¬
thiness that she cried for three days. Deciding to begin a new life, the nun wanted
to avoid unnecessary contact with other people and to strive to “exceed the most
holy.” She started praying four hours daily, until her confessor reigned in her prac¬
tice. At this moment of desire to transform her ways, God appeared and provided
direction. Although Ursula says she was fearful and like a slave ready to be beaten,
God insisted she listen to his message: she was to preach like St. Paul after his
conversion. God explains: “I put St. Paul’s words in you, because I want you to
preach as he did.”70 Although there is never any further clarification of this divine
command, of what it meant to preach like St. Paul, it is a directive that echoes
throughout the other notebooks, in spite of her confessor’s command that Ursula
follow the Virgin Mary’s submissive role rather than St. Paul’s active one.
At this key moment in the account of her spiritual life, Ursula justifies herself
by invoking divine will. When her confessor Padre Vinas questioned Ursula’s new
role and suggested a more subservient one, God corrects the confessor:
 Ursula Suarez 131

Father Vinas told me not to tell him what St. Paul said, but rather Samuel,
and the words of the Most Holy Virgin: Behold the handmaid; I, as I didn’t know,
said whatever came to mind . . . and it seemed that it came not from my soul,
but was only spoken by my mouth; I said it because the priest had ordered it,
but not with the efficacy with which I had said St. Paul’s words, because the
latter were dictated by my heart. On another occasion . .. this inner voice
said to me: “I want to manifest the strength of My power in you.”71

By quoting God directly, Ursula undermines her confessor’s authority over her life.
Ursula then decides to turn a new leaf: she leaves a devoto, reads devotional works on
the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, and prays for the souls of her parents. Rather
than advertise her spiritual transformation, however, Ursula swore Padre Vinas to
secrecy and begs her current confessor Padre Gamboa to keep the secret as well.72
In Ursula’s case, these changes do not lead to a desire to follow the mystic’s
path, but rather to create a new life that leaves behind the rogue’s deceit while main¬
taining a sense of humor and wit when facing hardships. After relating her defining
spiritual experience, Ursula’s subsequent cuentas de conciencia focus more on conflict
within the convent after 1694, with abbesses, confessors, and the bishop of Santiago.
These individual narrative units, like those written by Marla de San Jose (vols. 3—
12), follow a general chronological order but often describe unrelated incidents. With
the exception of the last two notebooks that appear to be written as a single piece
(vols. 13—14), the others were clearly written as discrete units (9,10,11, and 12).73 Some
were written after the death of the nun’s first addressee, Tomas de Gamboa, and
may have been written for an unnamed confessor who came upon the scene later, as
discussed later in this chapter. With the exception of the incomplete notebook 12,
notebooks 9, 10, n, and 13—14 recount a series of trials and illnesses.74 Struggles with
the vicress over convent rules (notebook 9), with her confessor Padre Aleman, whom
she dismisses (notebooks 10 and 13), with the abbess about Ursula’s close contact
with the bishop (notebook 10), and with the bishop himself and the convent over the
vote for abbess fill the pages (notebooks 10, 13—14). Convent politics and schisms ap¬
parently dominated Ursula’s life during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Not
surprisingly, it is in the final two notebooks, which recount the most intense years of
power struggles dealing with the controversial vote for abbess (1710—1715), that Ursula
pauses to question bitterly the church’s determination of model behavior for women
and of its canonization and Inquisitorial procedures in particular. In nearly every
notebook, however, God’s wish that she be a happy saint who uses her speech to
spread God’s Word comes through the anecdotes about conflict, even in the darkest
moments after the bishop’s punishment of her actions.
Both the nun and the ptcara lack complete discursive freedom because of their
positions in the church or in society, and the telling of their respective life stories is
often difficult.75 In the case of Ursula’s narrative, the tension between her desire to
construct her own self-portrait and her need to bow in obedience to her confessor
becomes apparent after she leaves her roguish ways behind. Subsequent notebooks
talk increasingly of rifts with the abbess, bishop, and confessors, but these often
132 NOT QUITE SINNERS

provide a springboard for Ursula to follow her belief that God wanted her to use
her voice both to preach and to offer laughter.
If before Ursula turned the tables on suitors and devotos, now she uses her link to
the divine to gain a degree of control over her confessors. Like Marla de San Jose, Ursula
exploits the possibilities of the mystic triad, the tripartite struggle for authority so typical
of nuns’ vidas. In the scene where God tells Ursula to preach like St. Paul, she feels
empowered to sermonize, which was a task strictly reserved for clergy. Padre Vinas, in
contrast, is portrayed as a spiritual director who fails to respect the Word of God. This
pattern characterizes all of her anecdotes regarding preaching. Upon telling her con¬
fessor about her mystical transport to India to evangelize, he concludes that she fabri¬
cated the story because her description of the inhabitants corresponded to Chinese
peoples.76 Although she decides to refrain from telling him anything else, soon she boasts
of more mystical transports to “Arab lands” and of converting a group of African
workers in the convent: “I asked them why they had not been baptized before; they
said they hadn’t known how to pray. ‘You,’ they said, ‘taught us how.’ I laughed at
their foolishness in saying that they had been unable to learn from the priests, but did
so from me.”77 Ursula highlights her role as an evangelist, but at the same time downplays
her own importance by putting the words into another’s mouth and making light of
the situation. Through the use of dramatic technique, of dialogue and humor, Ursula
objectifies her personal conflicts with the church and creates an almost theatrical role
for herself as a woman evangelist.
In addition to preaching, Ursula exalts her use of voice as a story-teller in the
convent. Among her convent sisters she was known as storyteller, for weaving enter¬
taining tales: “I am such a chatterbox that the nuns sought me out to amuse them,
and called me the storyteller.”78 Men and bishops sought her out for her humorous
stories and, in turn, donated money for new buildings. Before imposing the sentence
on Ursula, for example, Bishop Romero fondly called Ursula “the philosopher”; she
explains, “the bishop suffered from hypochondria; I, to amuse him, told him jokes
and made him laugh. . . . He enjoyed my silly jests.”79
In fact, remnants of the former picara who delights in her ruses come through
the narrative, but now the accounts are often “authored” by God himself. Although
there was talk in the convent of an affair between Ursula and Bishop Romero, for
example, God instructed her to accept the church father’s gifts because she had to
put up with his ill humor. Ursula reports that on another occasion God playfully
interjected a retort for her when the bishop stepped out of line. When discussing
the burdens of wearing religious clothing, the bishop asked her to touch his foot, to
witness the number of socks he wore. At that point, as Ursula records it, God piped
in saying a bishop should give her his hand, not his foot: “Tell the bishop that to
have offered you his foot was not by chance, but he should have given you his hand,
for many times [his feet] have trod on you. . . . Let him give you his hand and have
him remember that if indeed he has given his foot to a woman, in your case he should
put it away as for that reason I consecrated him.”80 Just as other nuns invoke God’s
words in their accounts about interactions with confessors, Ursula plays with church
hierarchy through the use of humor and dialogue with the divine. This incident, in
particular, is acoustically highlighted through the use of internal rhyme in the origi-
 Ursula Suarez 133

nal Spanish. Even God becomes a character that plays into these somewhat tantaliz¬
ing scenes. In another instance, Ursula records how God pleaded with her to remove
her nun’s wimple because he wanted to see her better (notebook 12). In Ursula’s eyes,
God is often playful.
As we saw in the opening of this chapter, when Ursula laments not being more
like her Clarist models, the mystic nun and author Maria de la Antigua and Mariana
de Escobar, God explains to Ursula the reason for this deviation: “My Lord and
Most Loving Father said to me: ‘I haven’t yet had a comedienne saint, and as there
are all manner of things in palaces, you are to be the comedienne.’ I said to Him:
My Lord and Father, I am grateful for all your benefits and mercies, and as you
wish to make me a saint, let it not be a saint without wit.’ He replied: ‘You will no
longer envy Doha Marina and [Maria de] la Antigua.’”81 As she explains later to her
convent sisters: “You are to know that I am going to be a saint, and not just any
saint, for the Church will have no other saint as madcap as I.”82 She will be the saint
that breaks the rules for sainthood, but will have God’s blessings for it. In fact, she
tells her reader(s), God had already granted her a divine mercy by assigning Maria
de la Antigua’s own guardian angel to Ursula, in addition to her original one. A nun
striving to be a perfecta religiosa like the popular Maria de la Antigua, whose mystic
Stations and exemplary biography were in nearly every Spanish American convent li¬
brary, now had an alternate path, the holy comedienne, who would be a character
who spoke God’s script for her and the mad cap saint (santa disparatada) who could
use humor for saintly ends.
Clearly, the balance of confession and the exhortation to virtue found in a model
nun’s vida, such as Marla de San Jose, is challenged in Ursula Suarez’s Relacion. Whereas
Marla’s vida details penances and trials in following the road to perfection and is
offered as both a confession and an example to her readers, Ursula’s stories from the
time she was three years old focus on the evils of the system of devotos de monjas and
argue that both secular and religious women should have more economic indepen¬
dence and freedom to speak. She is a storyteller who details the flaws in men, the
injustices done to women, and her own playful revenge.83 Men were permitted to
deceive women outside the convent and misjudge them in the cloister. In contrast,
society was harsh in its treatment of women who played with language in the same
way; they were called liars and heretics (embusteras and herejes).
Just as Sor Juana’s Respuesta weaves a multitude of genres into a new vida form in
order to highlight the shortcomings of the script for religious women, Ursula Suarez’s
literary borrowings help critique a patriarchal system that encouraged women to be
silent and financially dependent on men.84 As we have seen, both the vida and the
picaresque novel share an autobiographical form. But the vida tells the story of a
spiritual conversion bestowed by divine grace upon an undeserving sinner, while the
picaresque novel tells of a sinner on the margins of society who attempts to better
her economic circumstances. The “model nun” uses church-approved rhetoric to
establish the authority of her story as the will of God and exhorts others to follow
her example; in doing so, she secures a place for herself within society. The picara, in
contrast, masters a language of wit and cunning—often based on her sexual desir¬
ability—in order to take advantage of men and invert society’s hierarchies. Unfortu-
134 NOT QUITE SINNERS

nately for the picara, by sacrificing her integrity, she becomes the butt of her own
jokes and is held firmly in place by a comic distance established between character
and reader, one that reflects the impossibility of class ascent.85 As for the female
characters in the comedia, even if they rebel against conventions, generally in the end
order is restored—usually through marriage. In the hands of a female dramatist such
as Sor Juana or Marla de Zayas, however, the portrayal of these characters implies a
more far-reaching critique of society’s norms. Such divergent outcomes in the three
genres help readers recognize each genre and respond in different manners. The vida
provokes admiration of a real person well-connected to God; the comedia explores
society’s boundaries for male-female relationship and conventions; and the picaresque
novel serves as both entertainment and negative example.

Manuscripts, Compilers, and Meaning

But in the end, what effect does this inscription of Ursula’s story into the confes¬
sional form—with borrowings from other literary genres—have on our understanding
of her story? Is she a picara a lo divino, with the Catholic Church’s blessing for her
ruses? Or, as Kristine Ibsen suggests, does the moving story at the end of Ursula’s
Relation, about the severe punishment she received from a bishop—the only man who
seems to break her spirit—undo her self-portrait as a happy saint?
Upon first reading of the final notebook, it seems Ursula may have capitulated
to the demands of male church hierarchy. After several difficult encounters with nuns
who humiliate her, Ursula describes her tears and desire to be more saintlike and to
suffer. Then, in spite of her verbal mastery and partial success at portraying herself
as chosen by God, she recounts the alienation and illness that followed the bishop’s
sentence. In this moment, Ursula compares her public suffering at the hands of oth¬
ers with Christ’s Passion. The pain of this account only seems to be heightened in
the closing pages of the narrative. As mentioned earlier, she tells Padre Vinas about
a dream in which she killed a serpent by crushing it in her mouth, which turned
bloody.86 The dream might have originally been a rewriting of the association of
woman with Eve and the serpent with deceptive language and sin, but Ursula’s con¬
fessor dismisses it. He insists that snakes don’t have bones, and Ursula decides to
drop the topic:87 “When I told Padre Vinas about this, he told me: ‘It has no bones.’
I replied: ‘But I heard them crunch.’ ‘It has no bones,’ he repeated. I remained silent
and fought him no longer.”88 But even in the darkest moments after her sentencing
by the bishop, Ursula thanks God and jokes with him after a vision: “His Majesty
[God] told me: ‘There will be repercussions,’ and I told Him: ‘Thunder as well, so
that we will have a good party.’”89 It is a touching portrait of a nun who believes in
a God as a friend with a sense of humor.
On the other hand, Bishop Romero and Padre Vinas are portrayed as blocking
divine will. While Vinas argues with her in the confessional, the bishop follows a
pattern Ursula has criticized throughout her text: she criticizes men who support
nuns physically, but not intellectually or spiritually. She records in the final note¬
book that he sent her money and food after the sentence. But he also sent a warning:
Don t talk to me in Latin, don t mention St. Paul to me, and don’t quote the Bible
 Ursula Suarez 135

to me. ,0 In addition, Ursula urges her current, unnamed addressee and confessor to
keep her secret, something Bishop Romero failed to do.
Why did Ursula’s account end with these episodes with Padre Vinas and Bishop
Romero in 1715? Why, when some of the writings were probably composed as late as
1730 or 1732 and one of the manuscripts we have was Ursula’s own copy of her origi¬
nal notebooks, is her rise to abbess mentioned in the context of the 1710 election
fraud but never described once she was in power in 1721? As in the case of Catarina
de San Juan, only more archival research will give us definitive answers—just as re¬
cent finds for Sor Juana’s life have clarified some of the enigmas of her last years.
Nonetheless, we can conjecture that perhaps Ursula, as an escritora por obediencia, was
asked to copy certain notebooks, ones that recounted an engaging life story, but also
offered a moral in the end. In other words, as in the picaresque tradition, there prob¬
ably is a didactic message in Ursula’s story: too much roguishness and irreverent
laughter lead to the need to undergo penance, experience remorse, and learn to be
silent. Perhaps this is the effect that she foreshadows in notebook 10 when she records
the following:

Considering so many mercies received from [God’s] infinite goodness, I

said to Him: “Lord and Master of all that I am, my only love and entire
goodness, it seems that You wish to make my folly truth.” He responded:
“You were prophesying about yourself.” I said to Him “I, a prophet in my
land?” He said “In your case all is pardoned.” I said to Him: “And when
do I get to be a saint?” to which He responded: “When you are silent.” I
said to Him: “I have a long way to go, for I cannot be silent.”91

What is more, if Ursula’s notebooks had traveled a path like those of Teresa
and Maria de San Jose, the writings would have been turned over to confessors and
later carefully reordered, and at times recopied.92 Perhaps Ursula’s own confessors
reordered the notebooks, using the first eight as the basic vida narrative unit, and then
added on miscellaneous notebooks as they saw fit to fill in the years leading to the
1715 sentencing in order to create a final ending more in keeping with the model nun.
If this scenario is true, Ursula’s story ultimately follows the pattern we have seen in
Rosa, Maria, Catarina, and Sor Juana: the Clarist nun’s own life story and self¬
representation is once again mediated—in this case, by selection or omission of cer¬
tain notebooks—so as to inscribe her story, however unusual, into a conventional
tale that ends on a note of submission. Readers of this version of the Relation are left
to think that Ursula’s talkative, witty ways were quashed permanently in 1715. What
a story might Ursula’s other letters and confessional notebooks written during her
years as abbess and her last quarter century tell (if they exist at all)?93
In fact, we might conjecture that her case could have been like that of Sor
Juana’s—an independent spirit that the church ultimately could not silence. In a
previous reading, I suggested that in the end Ursula is marginalized much like the
picaresque figure from the literary world. Other critics have also taken this final
portrait at face value.94 A number of half-answered enigmas and a closer look at the
narrative tone, however, point to a plausible and very different conclusion. Piecing
together period church politics, confessors, and addressees, a completely different
136 NOT QUITE SINNERS

scenario and interpretation could be argued—one in which Ursula is not humbled

but, rather, encouraged by a new confessor to reveal the details of a severe conflict
and schism in the convent and the turbulent times that male clergy were experienc¬
ing with their own superiors, the Inquisition, and the king.
Although the final notebook depicts a humbled Ursula, for the most part the
tone and extensive detail belie the portrait of a truly submissive nun bowing to church
superiors. In the notebooks that appear to be written for a new addressee (notebooks
ii and 13—14), Ursula reveals full names and details for the events that took place
during a decade of intense church politics (ca. 1710—1720).95 Ursula describes unjust
treatment with no restraint, and records through direct quotes the often unchari¬
table words of others; she writes a script of the events. She names her confessors,
Padres Vinas and Gamboa, though infrequently, but portrays Padre Aleman, the
confessor she dismissed, as a primary source of conflict. Likewise, she assigns the
role of the jealous antagonist to the abbess who won out over Ursula (who was
Gamboa’s own sister). But she reserves her harshest words for Bishop Romero. After
chatting frequently with Ursula, he turns on her: he revokes the convent vote, sen¬
tences her to punishment, fails to keep his sacramental vow of secrecy, and blocks
God’s will that she follow in St. Paul’s footsteps. Mostly, it is the direct discourse of
other characters who condemn the bishop, as when the abbess cautions Ursula about
some bishops’ immoral conduct: “She said to me: ‘Haven’t you read of cases where
bishops have had children?”’96 Ursula’s final portraits of Padre Aleman and Bishop
Romero read more like a vendetta than the words of an obedient nun.
Who was the new addressee of these notebooks? Why did Ursula write these
accounts for him? And why were they included in the Relation? As we have seen in
Maria de San Jose’s case, the role of the reader had everything to do with the mate¬
rial, as well as the tone of an account. For example, Maria’s first account of a con¬
vent schism was full of ambiguity. But later, under the protection of a new addressee,
the bishop of Oaxaca, a second account clearly describes the cause of the schism.97
Ursula may have been encouraged by a new regime of clerics to describe the tumul¬
tuous Santiago church politics in the 1710s. Writing at least a decade after the events,
and having been vindicated by being chosen as abbess by the new bishop Alejo
Fernandez Rojas, Ursula was now in power.98 Moreover, most of her antagonists
had died by the time the last changes were made to these accounts (ca. 1730-1732)."
Vinas and Aleman died within a year of each other (1718 and 1719, respectively), and
Gamboa and Romero both died in 1729. Perhaps it was then safe to reveal the diffi¬
cult change in confessors and the politics of a controversial convent vote. Romero’s
death, combined with that of her first addressee for the vi'da, Gamboa, may have served
as a catalyst for these final notebooks, binding them with the first eight.
A look at the difficulties Ursula’s antagonists had with their own superiors may
further support the theory that these accounts were written to shed light on several
controversial situations from 1710 to 1720 in Santiago. Kristine Ibsen notes that Anto¬
nio Aleman served as confessor to one of the accused in the polemical Inquisition trial
of the Jesuit Juan Francisco Ulloa. Ulloa was posthumously tried for heresy. Because
he had been a spiritual director for several religious women, the repercussions of the
trial affected female religious communities like Ursula’s where many nuns worked with
 Ursula Suarez 137

Jesuit confessors. Begun in 1715, the same year as Ursula’s sentence, the trial did not
come to a complete close until nearly fifteen years later (about the time she finished
her notebooks).100 At one point, the bishop removed a Clarist nun from her adminis¬
trative post as a result of the trial, and this may explain why Ursula mentions the infa¬
mous Inquisition trial in Peru against Angela Carranza and the case in Spain in which
the well-known Fray Luis de Granada was implicated in promoting a “false holy
woman.” Ursula questions God: ‘‘My Lord, why, when you are merciful to women,
does the Inquisition make inquiries about them?”101 These situations that Ursula men¬
tions may have served as a foil for the circumstances in Ursula’s own convent.102
Another historical fact may come into play in Ursula’s portrait of Bishop Romero.
In 1710 he took a hard reformist stand by ordering new prayer routines and banning
the devoto system—the important, if highly criticized, source for income—and en¬
forced complete enclosure of the convent.103 Despite Ursula’s constant critique of
the system, she records the bishop’s lack of discretion in his public announcement of
the new rule. In fact, Juan de Guernica’s history of the convent reveals the constant
financial straits of the convent and its need for funds. In some ways, the devoto sys¬
tem, may have been simply a practical mechanism to address the convent’s economic
situation. A probably all-important part of this historical puzzle is that in 1718 Bishop
Romero himself was accused of disloyalty to the Crown and was stripped of his po¬
sition in Santiago and sent to Quito.104 His death in 1729 may have provoked more
inquiry into his life from other clergy asking Ursula for a record of her interactions
with him. Ursula’s criticism may have been solicited by clergy bent on further dis¬
crediting the bishop. In addition, other historical events, such as the 1730 earthquake
that devastated large parts of the Clarist convent and another controversy over the
position of abbess, certainly would have contributed to a change in convent admin¬
istration and power.105
While more questions than answers surround the role of readers and church
politics, and their effect on Ursula’s life writings, the questions themselves point once
again to the crucial interaction between church institutions and individuals. Like the
nuns themselves, confessors and bishops were often asked for an accounting of their
actions, but they usually did not write life stories about the turmoil and controversy.
Moreover, the hierarchical system among women religious within the convent often
caused as much strife as the spiritual father-daughter relationship, as seen in the
conflict over elections of the abbess.
In the end, Ursula’s own self-portrait offers an alternative to the saint or sinner
models codified by the official church for religious women. Her account mentions
examples of both extremes—the holy mystic Sor Maria de la Antigua and the he¬
retical Angela Carranza—but her life follows neither completely. She fashioned a
life path in which she avoided the Inquisition, but she did not escape being punished
by a bishop and did not become the subject of a hagiographic biography. Ursula
successfully deviated from strict interpretation of church mandates for women be¬
cause she was willing to risk censure in order to create an alternate path to the di¬
vine, and because for years she was well connected to influential clergy. The one case
on record that Ursula was punished can be explained by a change in church politics
and her personal relationship with a bishop.
138 NOT QUITE SINNERS

Ursula’s story may not have been promoted for many other reasons as well. Like
the Colombian mystic Madre Castillo (1671—1742), whose life was not posthumously
promoted by the church, Ursula lived in a large convent for seven decades.106 Being
enclosed for so many years and living in one of the nonprestigious orders surely lim¬
ited her exposure to a wider circle of society. Other factors, such as chronology and
geography, may have also been important. By the time Ursula died in the mid—eigh¬
teenth century, the most prolific period of vida writing and publication was ending.
And there is some evidence that the norms for nuns’ writing had become more lax.
Kristin Routt argues this point in the case of Madre Maria Ana Agueda de San Ignacio,
whose mystical works were published in her own lifetime, in mid-eighteenth-century
New Spain. Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau argue in the case of another late
eighteenth-century nun that the language of mysticism had become so heavily codi¬
fied that it lost the fresh individual expression of the writings by earlier nuns (Sor
Marcela in particular).107 Parodies of a literary genre often seem to emerge when the
form becomes weighed down with stylistic conventions. Ursula was also isolated geo¬
graphically. Although Santiago had convents and a bishop, it was nonetheless on the
periphery of the Spanish empire. More than a thousand miles from the center of the
viceroyalty in Lima—where the major institutional church decisions were made,
executed, and published—Santiago had the same provincial flavor as Madre Castillo’s
Tunja in Colombia. As we will see in the next chapter, with the Lieutenant Nun,
norms were often more relaxed as one traveled farther from the ruling centers of
colonial institutions. Ursula’s colloquial register may have been tolerated because the
system of official surveillance was weak at such a distance from the seat of power.
Within several decades of Ursula’s death, broadly based convent reforms were
initiated by the Bourbon monarchy. Large convents that followed regular rule (ver¬
sus reformed orders, such as Teresa’s and Madre Marla’s orders) were particularly
targeted. In the end, while neither Ursula nor her text were sent to the Inquisition,
her voice and life were forgotten for many years because no rescripting of her life
occurred and her manuscript was buried in the archive. But since its publication at
the end of the twentieth century we are now able to appreciate how a text like
Ursula’s adds to our store of life stories. The Relation reveals Ursula’s creative re¬
sponse when confronting prescriptions for women’s roles and stories. More than
any woman discussed in this book, Ursula comments directly on the daily life of
upper-class women. Through a hybrid self-narrative, she critiques marriage and
the financial workings of a household, as well as the politics, spirituality, and eco¬
nomics of convent life.

Chronology of Ursula Suarez

1666 Born Ursula Suarez de Escobar in Santiago de Chile.

1678 Enters the newly founded Clarist Convent located on the Plaza de
las Armas.
1684 Professes as a full-fledged black-veiled nun.
1684—1710 Holds various roles in the convent as dispensora, definadorai, provisora,
escucha.
 Ursula Suarez 139

1708 Begins the Relation for her confessor Tomas de Gamboa.

1710 Loses bid for position as convent abbess; is appointed as vicaria by
Bishop Romero.
1715 Defeated a second time in convent elections for abbess.
1715 Ecclesiastical sentence imposed on Ursula by Bishop Romero.
1718 Padre Vinas dies.
1719 Padre Aleman dies.
1721—1724 Serves as convent abbess.
1725 Serves as convent president (a one-year extension as abbess).
1729 Bishop Romero and Padre Gamboa die.
1730 Earthquake partially destroys convent.
Probably wrote/revised some of the final notebooks in the Relation
(in particular, notebook 10).

1749 Dies.
ca. 1850 Don Jose' Ignacio Victor Eyzaguirre, presbitero, copies the manu¬
script held by the original convent.
1914 Transcription of the Relation made.
1984 First published edition of the manuscript (done by Mario Ferreccio
Podesta).
6
\

The Lieutenant Nun

Catalina de Eruaso (ljgzP—l6jo) — Soldiers’ Tales and Virginity

“I kissed the foot of His Holiness Urban VIII and told him succinctly, and as best I
could all about my life, adventures, gender, and virginity. His Holiness appeared to
be astonished thereby, and graciously gave me permission to continue to lead my life
dressed as a man, urging me to lead an honest life from now on.”
—Vida, chap. 25

“News of this event spread everywhere very quickly, and people who had seen me
before, and people, both before and after, who heard my story all over the Indies were
amazed.”
—Vida, chap. 20

O nly a few years after the streets of Lima had filled upon news of Rosa de Lima’s
death, they filled again with onlookers as the now infamous Lieutenant Catalina
de Erauso arrived in a litter escorted by ten men of cloth and six swordsmen.1 After
having disguised herself as a man for nearly twenty years and earned a reputation as
a brave soldier and rogue on the frontiers of the Spanish empire in Chile, Catalina
had been ordered to take the veil as a nun.2 She had killed a man in a duel over a card
game, and in order to protect herself from the law, she had confessed to a bishop
and revealed her true identity as a woman who had once lived in a convent in Spain.
The bishop spared her life under the condition that she return to her previous pro¬
fession as a bride of Christ.
In her account to the bishop, Catalina reported having been born to a well-to-
do family in the Basque country, entering her aunt’s convent at the age of four. She
escaped before professing her vows at age fifteen, donned male garb to serve as a
page, and finally embarked for America, where she worked at various occupations,
including those of merchant and soldier. Catalina also confessed to having maimed
and killed many men. Thus, after years of battles against fierce indigenous tribes,
duels over gambling and ladies, and quick escapes, the Lieutenant Nun (La Monja
Alferez)—as she came to be known—entered a convent for several years. There she
awaited official confirmation from Spain that she had been a novice but had escaped
the convent before taking final and irrevocable vows, which carried with them man¬
datory enclosure for life. After letters crisscrossed the Atlantic and proof of her secular

140
 Catalina de Eruaso

status finally arrived, Catalina again rejected the nun’s veil and put on trousers. Rather
than take up her previous life on the frontier, she embarked for her homeland. She
spent the next six years settling her share of the family estate, initiating a series of
petitions, and dictating or writing her memoirs.3 During these years she also sat for
a portrait done by the well-known Spanish painter, Francisco Pacheco (see figure
6.1). In 1630 Catalina again set sail for America—this time to base herself in New
Spain as a muleteer and small merchant, under the alias of Antonio de Erauso—and
appears to have lived in relative obscurity,4
The admiration and astonishment expressed by the crowds that had gathered
to witness Catalina’s entrance into Lima and the religious authorities who heard her
confession were mere preludes to the sensation her story caused in Europe. Although
both canon and civil law prohibited cross-dressing, the highest ranking officials of
the Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire granted Catalina’s petition to remain
dressed as a man.5 The Monja Alferez’s petition to the Crown, in fact, builds a case
upon a dual argument: the merits of her deeds as a soldier and the singularity of her
position as a woman fighting in the army.6 The reactions of King Philip IV and Pope
Urban VIII upon hearing Catalina recount her story, as recorded later in the first-
person memoirs Vida i sucesos de la Monja Aljtrez (ca. 1625), confirm that it was indeed
the uniqueness of her position as a valiant woman soldier—and, more important, an
“intact virgin”—that brought her such acceptance.7 Catalina de Erauso slipped
through the cracks of Spanish society’s roles for women and reemerged as a cultural
phenomenon, due in large part to her successful negotiation of institutionalized codes
for behavior and the remoteness of the American frontier.
Perhaps more than any woman discussed in this volume, Catalina’s story high¬
lights the contradictions between period rules and actual practices. In the very years
that Rosa de Lima’s case for sainthood was being questioned in Lima, Seville, Madrid,
and Rome, Catalina’s rebellion against being enclosed in the convent was given
the seal of approval from church and Crown in these same cities. Although one
woman came to represent the saint and the other the pardoned sinner, both were
incorporated into the institutionalized aspects of the Spanish empire and Counter-
Reformation Catholic Church. The lapses in Rosa’s and Catalina’s behavior—in par¬
ticular, their refusal to be enclosed in a convent—were overlooked because their life
stories demonstrated heroic virtue and astounding singular feats for their sex. In spite
of her lapses in following Counter-Reformation guidelines, Rosa came to represent
the universal qualities of saintly virtue. By rejecting the life of a woman, Catalina
created an alternate identity—one that was both notorious and officially accepted
because of its valor and singularity.
Key to both women’s success was their manipulation of the rules governing the
female body. Following medieval models, Rosa’s hallmark for sanctity was her ex¬
treme penances, which highlighted the role of women’s bodies as the vehicle for vir¬
tue and fame. Through suffering it was thought women erased female characteristics
of sexuality and become virile, manly women.8 Biographic and hagiographic tradi¬
tion further promoted the idea that women needed to transcend their nature to achieve
great virtue. Sacred biographies narrated the lives of transvestite women, including
such popular sainted women as Margaret of Antioch, Eugenia of Alexandria, and
Figure 6. i Portrait of Catalina de Erauso by Francisco Pacheco, ca. 1625 (From The
Nun Ensign by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, London, 1907)
 Catalina de Eruaso

Joan of Arc. A brief look at these life stories, recorded in the popular Flos Sanctorum,
reveals that male garb helped women follow a virtuous Christian path. In another
tradition, women were compared to the mythic Amazon warrior women. Since at
least Teresa of Avila s time, biographers had employed the metaphor of the Amazon
woman to signal the level of heroic virtue religious women achieved; they were war¬
rior women for Christianity.
Catalina de Erauso s life drew on the central role of women’s bodies for deter¬
mining their life paths, but she inverted the tradition of the saintly transvestite and
the manly warrior religious woman. Through cross-dressing, Catalina’s life truly be¬
came like a man’s, but her virtue was dubious at best. Catalina played the roles of
a conquistador (for gold rather than souls) and lawless adventurer. A closer ex¬
amination of the ways in which Catalina (and others) could “re-present” her life
in legal petitions, first-person memoirs, and biographies exemplifies the flux found
in seventeenth-century rules and society. Whereas Ursula Suarez and Sor Juana
worked closely with the model of the perfecta religiosa in order to modify it and in¬
cluded roles for humorous saints and lettered women, Catalina de Erauso lived out
a life that blatantly defied rules. Gender roles, narrative genre conventions, and geo¬
graphical settings all contributed to the success of this alternate life story.

The Life and Adventures of a Wanderer

Catalina was born in 1592 to a well-established Basque family in northern Spain, one
of nine children.9 The first dozen years of her life do not differ significantly from
other upper-class women of her time. Her earliest years were spent with her mother
and father, Doha Marla Perez de Galarraga y Arce and Captain Miguel de Erauso,
both natives of San Sebastian.10 At the young age of four, Catalina went to live with
an aunt and several sisters in a Dominican convent in the same city. In this large,
unreformed convent, she had access to a fairly lively life and a good education.
Nonetheless, according to the account in her memoirs, as an adolescent she had a
conflict with one nun, so she escaped the cloister and set out to see the world dis¬
guised as a boy. For about three years she stayed in Spain, despite several close en¬
counters with family members. It is clear that Catalina received a fairly good education
in the convent because she continually landed posts that required good writing and
accounting skills; more than once she was entrusted with managing a shop. In an¬
other post, she served as a page to a high-ranking official in the king’s court in
Vallodolid. Another master, a university professor, recognized Catalina’s facility for
Latin and vehemently urged her to follow a university education. An offer that might
have been snatched up by Sor Juana, was flatly refused by Catalina, who confesses to
having an urge (inclinasion) to travel: “I had a taste for roving and seeing the world.”11
She soon embarked on a Spanish galleon headed for America. Following the paths
of several brothers, Catalina set out to seek her fortune.12
Part of a well-connected, adventurous Basque clan, Catalma coincidentally landed
on her uncle’s ship; unbeknownst to him, he had hired his own niece. The ship was
part of the Spanish enterprise in the Indies: the crew encountered enemies, and many
Spaniards died before the vessel was loaded with silver and headed for Spain again.
144 NOT QUITE SINNERS

But Catalina jumped ship to stay in America, where she would spend nearly two
decades (ca. 1603—1623) moving from the center of the Spanish American shipping
industry in the Caribbean to the more remote areas of the viceroyalty of Peru. Even
in the New World, Catalina seemed to be well connected. Her memoirs describe
how she was given a letter of presentation to the chief consul of Lima for apost
(chap. 5). She served as a shop clerk until having a run-in with her employer—over
a woman. At this point, Catalina decided to join the entradas, the mercenary soldiers
hired in Lima to travel south 540 leagues to Concepcion and Valdivia, Chile, to fight
the rebellious Mapuche (known in colonial times as the Araucanians). There fate
once again would bring Catalina close to family: she served as a soldier for her brother
Miguel de Erauso, the secretary of war. He never recognized her in disguise, perhaps
because he had left home when she was two years old. Another altercation over a
woman—this time her brother’s own mistress—would change the course of her life
again. Catalina was banished to fight on the front line in Paicabi for three years.
Enduring frequent invasions by the enemy, Catalina made her mark in Paicabi as a
hero by recapturing the Spanish flag and being wounded. With this heroic act, she
would receive the title of “ensign” (aljerez). Soon afterward, she accidently killed her
own brother in a duel and began years of wandering from city to city.
A period chronicle by an anonymous writer gives us a sense of the social flux in
which Catalina lived in early seventeenth-century Peru. Many men lived as vagabonds
or became soldiers as a way to make a living. According to the chronicle, the most am¬
bitious went off to become soldiers in Chile, as Catalina had. The most lazy lived off
of others and gambling. This is the life Catalina would live after her years as a soldier:

There are other poor proud [men], who, as they are unable to bite, bark,
and always go around with their head down looking for an opportunity;
they neither wish to be controlled, nor is there any reasoning with them.
This type of people are called soldiers, not because they are, but because
they wander freely from one place to another, always with cards in their
hands so as not to miss any opportunity of playing with whomever they
may meet, and if by chance they encounter a greenhorn or a newly-arrived
Spaniard who is not skilled and well disciplined in his own malice, or whose
malice does not go so far [as to include] false cards, they best them and
take away their money and their property. . . . They are boundless cheats,
whose only concern is mastering the art of deception. There are many of
this ilk who are wandering around Peru. And for the most part they are
enemies of the rich, and live only for news and quarrels and trouble¬
making in the Kingdom, for thieving and getting their hands on goods they
can only get by means of wars and strife. They are people who do not wish
to serve. They are all well dressed, as they are never in want of a negress or
an Indian woman and some Spanish women, and not necessarily of the poor¬
est kind. . . . They are the greatest vagabonds in Peru . . . and they seek their
living as best they can. Another type of people of lesser importance, who
are less skilled and not as free in the art of flattery, and who lack the means
to vagabond about from one place to another, and also because they are
 Catalina de Eruaso

more willing to work and bear arms and eat the King’s bread, these enlist
as soldiers, as every year people in Lima are recruited for the kingdom of
Chile. And they take them down there under their banners to fight the
Araucanians. In Lima they give them two hundred pesos, with which to get
a uniform. By these means the land is rid of them and people are sent against
the indomitable Araucanians. Few of these soldiers return to Peru.13

As recorded in her memoirs and frequently confirmed by other petitions, Catalina’s

adventures took her across great distances, much of what today is Peru and Bolivia,
from the desert Pacific coast across the Andes into the center of the Inca empire in
Cuzco, to the mining town of Potosi and back again to Lima (chaps. 4—20). In the
memoirs, these years are characterized by short stays in towns and occupations in¬
terrupted by the need to flee because of conflict over ladies or gambling. At one point,
Catalina even toyed with a marriage proposal to a woman (chap. 7). At another, she
faced the death penalty but escaped (chap. 17). The duel and resulting death of one
opponent, however, finally led to her flight to Guamanga, where she was detained
by authorities (chap. 20). A period letter describes how Catalina appeared armed and
dressed as a man when she met with the bishop of Guamanga Fray Augustin de
Carvajal.14
At this moment, Catalina’s fate as a fairly anonymous adventurer changed for¬
ever; her disguise was uncovered, and news of her life spread to secular and ecceliastical
authorities. As with all the women studied in this book, the moment in which a one¬
time nun or religious woman had to deal with a bishop’s authority to judge her life
and either authorize it as valid—and then promote it as exemplary—or censure it,
was a pivotal one. If approved by the bishop, the woman’s life was frequently insti¬
tutionalized through autobiographical and biographical accounts. If censured, the
woman could have her field of action severely limited, if only temporarily, as we saw
in Sor Juana’s and Ursula’s cases. In Catalina’s memoirs, the bishop is characterized
as a saintly man who helped her. After questioning Catalina, he marveled at the sin¬
gularity of her life story, saved her from being prosecuted by secular authorities, de¬
cided to place her in a local convent until her ex-convent in Spain could confirm her
lay or religious status, and promised to protect her personally as long as he lived.15
Upon handing Catalina over to the nuns in Guamanga, he required that they sign a
statement agreeing to obey his orders when dealing with her. He died five months
later, however, and Catalina went to a Lima convent under the supervision of the
archbishop. But her fame had spread widely already: the viceroy requested that she
dine with him first before entering the convent (chap. 20).
A.s mentioned, upon her release from the convent, Catalina embarked for Spain
to begin a series of petitions. Beginning with the Consejo de Indias in Seville, mov¬
ing on to the court of King Philip IV, and, finally, traveling overland—and being
captured and accused of being a spy en route—to the Vatican, Catalina succeeded
in obtaining the monies and licenses she sought. Soon after, she returned to life on
the road, but this time as a muleteer transporting goods inland from the port of
Veracruz, New Spam. Known as Antonio de Erauso, she apparently did not return
to her lawless life. For the final two decades of her life (ca. 1630—1650) she obeyed
146 NOT QUITE SINNERS

the pope’s request “to lead an honest life from now on, and to refrain from offend¬
ing my fellow man, reminding me of God’s justice with reference to His command¬
ment ‘Thou shalt not kill.”’16
Although we have few details about these final years of her life, Catalina s no¬
toriety was still intact enough that in 1653 a New Spanish publishing house reprinted
a 1625 broadside about her life, as well as a new anonymous account about her life
and death. Both publications highlight the sensational aspects of Catalina’s life as
someone who combined gender expectations. More significantly, the latter broad¬
side claims the Monja Alferez as an officially recognized hero for New Spain. Ac¬
cording to this apocryphal account, Bishop Palafox y Mendoza—the same bishop
whose portrait circulated with Catarina de San Juan’s—wanted to exhume Catalina s
remains and rebury them in Puebla, Mexico, in order to honor her memory and to
bring fame to his city. Bishop Palafox had left New Spain before Catalina’s death
(1649), but like other hagiographic works of the period, the account recognizes the
power of invoking—even if falsely—a bishop’s authority to promote local heroes
for the colony.17 Catalina’s notoriety continued for at least the rest of the century in
Spanish America; enough so that a satirist compared Sor Juana with the Monja
Alferez.18

The Writing of a Hybrid Life

During Catalina’s life and in subsequent decades, historical and literary works, as well
as folk tales, flourished about the unusual Monja Alfe'rez. Theatre, poetry, historical
chronicles, and biographical broadsides proliferated in manuscript and published forms,
and several were translated into Italian.19 The most notable contemporary literary work,
Juan Perez de Montalban’s play, La Monja Alferez; comediafamosa (1626), highlights Catalina’s
cross-dressing and ends with her confessing her true identity as a woman. But while
the woman Catalina had courted ends up marrying a man, following Golden Age the¬
atrical plot convention, Catalina does not marry, and the play’s final words report her
actual whereabouts in 1626: “Where the play ends, so do the actual events, since today
the Lieutenant Nun is in Rome.”20 Perhaps the most significant seventeenth-century
historical texts that document Catalina’s life are the aforementioned broadsides, writ¬
ten in installments and published in both Spain and Mexico (1625, 1653) and a chapter
in a history by Diego de Rosales about the conquest of the kingdom of Chile (written
ca. 1660).21 As Stephanie Merrim and Rima Vallbona have shown, the history inscribes
the Monja Alferez’s story into hagiographic tradition, emphasizing the penitential nature
of Catalina’s deeds. In contrast, the broadsides, a genre often used to incite interest in
noteworthy current events—anticipating the birth of modem journalism—highlight
the sensational aspects of Catalina’s life. In some regards, they follow the first-person
memoirs of Catalina’s life, Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alferez, a manuscript which was pur¬
portedly deposited in 1625 in the same publishing house where the broadsides were
printed. But these memoirs, the mostly lengthy account of her life and attributed at
least in part to Catalina, were not published until centuries later.22 Because the Vida i
sucesos is structured like an autobiographical vida, it is the central literary focus of this
chapter.
 Catalina de Eruaso 147

Analysis of the textual representation in the Vida i sucesos of Catalina’s life story,
however, poses the perhaps unanswerable question. To what degree are these first-
person memoirs historical fact or legendary fiction? After examining a number of
manuscript variants—none of which are the autograph manuscript by Catalina—
and secondary documents, most scholars agree on one point: Catalina at least had a
hand in her memoirs.23 Joaquin Maria de Ferrer’s early twentieth-century edition,
Rima de Vallbona’s recent masterful edition, and Pedro Rubio Merino’s edition of
new archival versions take great pains to examine the authenticity of texts about a
historical figure who so easily lent herself to legend. While Ferrer and Vallbona in¬
clude a variety of related legal documents, such as the 1625—1626 petitions and sworn
statements from character witnesses, these editions focus on the central literary-
historical text of Catalina’s Vida i sucesos. Most critics, and Vallbona in particular,
provide a convincing case for Catalina having had a hand in composing the text, which
may have been rewritten as she dictated it or was later elaborated on by another author.
One of the points often made in the literary ghost writer theory, however, has been
that Catalina did not have sufficient training to write such an accomplished piece on
her own.24 Recent studies about the nature of convent life reveal that Catalina prob¬
ably was well trained, a fact supported by the reports about the posts she filled as
clerk and about knowing Latin ( Vida, chap. 1). In addition, conclusions that adduce
that her lack of a formal education proves that her account was composed by a ghost
writer do not take into account the power of oral storytelling, so common among
soldiers and tavern-goers of the period. The quick, lively scenes of conflict and reso¬
lution with a precarious escape found in the Vida i sucesos are characteristic of popular
storytelling. Vallbona herself points to the need to explore these oral genres in order
to better analyze the memoirs and concludes that the issue of the authorship of the
Vida will continue to be unresolved until the original manuscript is found.25
Although this uncertainty about the nature of the authorship of the Vida i sucesos
limits the claims we can make, it functions to inscribe the memoirs firmly into colonial
discourse which is frequendy characterized by issues of historical truth and mediation.26
As we have seen in previous chapters, colonial narratives are often a mixture of legal
forms, literary topoi, historiography, and personal testimony, which typically reflect a
high degree of mediation as judges, confessors, scribes, and editors altered accounts for
political and religious ends. While the Vida i sucesos might undermine the notion of a
single authoritative author, it reveals a dynamic discursive reconstruction of a life story,
one based as much on “the historical record” as on religious, political, and literary codes
as they were established in Spain and modified in America. Catalina’s official petitions
highlight her various roles as brave soldier on the frontier, loyal vassal to the king, pil¬
grim to Rome, and virgin: “She told the scribe ‘she has spent 15 years in the service of
Your Majesty in the wars of the kingdom of Chile ... in defense of the Catholic faith
in the service of Your Majesty.’”27 fder unofficial memoirs, however, tell a story of
transgressive deeds that entertain the reader and draw on the full range of narrative
possibilities for a man or woman writing a full-length autobiographical life story. The
basic facts found in the Vida and petitions generally coincide, yet the tone and focus
diverge dramatically. The page-long petitions follow the forensic style and formulas
of the reports of services and merits (memorial de serviciosy meritos') in which the “I” peti-
tions a superior—usually the king—for reward after years as a loyal vassal who risked
life and limb for the monarch’s interest, although Catalina alters the conventions to
include the uniqueness of her feats as a woman. Lengthier relaciones and vidas were often
composed as a prolonged petition to place the service rendered in the context of an
individual’s life story, but in Catalina’s case, the Vida shifts from tales of heroic courage
to anecdotes of doubtful exemplarity.
In fact, most recent critics who study Catalina’s case (Marjorie Garber, E. Juarez,
Stephanie Merrim, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Sherry Velasco, Rima Vallbona, among
others)28 elucidate seventeenth-century legal, religious, and literary practices, and
suggest that the Monja Alferez’s life and texts capitalized on loopholes in what has
largely been perceived by twentieth-century scholars as a rigid gender and moral code.
Perry convincingly argues that Catalina’s case slipped through the legal system be¬
cause civic law reflected society’s assumption that people would be prosecuted ac¬
cording to his or her biological sex, either as a man or a woman.29 Both ecclesiastic
and secular frameworks only allowed for two categories for adult whites’ sexual iden¬
tity. Catalina could not be prosecuted as a man for her misdeeds because she had
been a nun; but neither could they process her as a woman because she had lived as
a loyal soldier. In one of the few literary studies of Catalina’s life and texts, Stephanie
Merrim astutely argues that the baroque aesthetic, which prized singularity, marvel,
and the unveiling of a reality that is not what it seems, serves as a key to understand¬
ing Catalina’s success; her life had intrinsic literary and cultural value as an anomaly
that mitigated the consequences of her transgressive acts. Catalina became a cultural
icon through the manipulation of seventeenth-century concepts of gender and fame.
In a later rewriting of this study, Merrim convincingly argues that, in addition
to the baroque aesthetic, Catalina’s case demonstrates contemporary medical theo-
nes about the body. From at least the time of Galen and Augustine, the idea existed
of women as incomplete men; women's bodies had lacked the heat needed to com¬
plete the process of turning the genitals outside of the body. As a result of this single¬
sex biological model, there was more slippage for women to become like men than
vice-versa.30 Augmenting this argument, Sherry Velasco analyzes the cultural repre-
sentations of transgenderism in the Lieutenant Nun across four centuries. Of par¬
ticular interest are her findings about the possibilities for hybrid identities in the
designation of sexual characteristics in the early modern period (chap. i). In one case
I_found in the Madrid archives, a contemporary account reports how a nun in a
convent in Ubeda, Spain, had undergone a spontaneous bodily transformation and
become a man.31 The account is recorded by the priest in charge of the convent. The
popularity of period accounts about transgenderism reveals people’s fascination with
the topic. Interest in linking these transsexual and transvestite stories with religious
women is clear in a famous painting found in a Mexican Carmelite convent of St.
Esofrina, who was said to have lived as a man in a convent for more than three de¬
cades; one of New Spain’s most venerated Carmelites is depicted alongside the saint.32
With regard to the most enticing document about Catalina’s life, the memoirs,
all critics point to the unusual blending of a broad range of literary genres, including
confessional literature, picaresque tales, soldiers’ accounts, chronicles, and cloak and
dagger theatre.33 And yet, little has been said of the relationship this generic mixture
 Catalina de Eruaso

may have to do with the gender-blending life of Catalina. Critics tend to emphasize
the transgressive tone of Catalina’s Vida i sucesos and link it with the soldier’s and male
picaro’s story, or period drama, but they overlook the role of the most prescribed
genre for women’s self-writing, the spiritual vida, and the fictional role of the female
rogue. An analysis of the narrative construction of the Vida i sucesos helps us better
understand how Catalina’s life reflected Spain’s encounter with the Americas—how
the ad hoc nature of life in a new colony or on the frontier often pushed literary,
historical, and societal conventions to new limits.
To unravel the intrinsic relationship between the sexual/textual, gender/genre
cross-over in the Monja Alferez’s narrative, it is important to recall that early mod¬
ern self-narratives usually were written by men and women to justify their actions as
in keeping with societal norms.34 Whether recorded as an act of obedience to a con¬
fessor (as in the case of most spiritual autobiography), as a soldier’s petition for re¬
muneration for services rendered, or as a rogue’s fictionalization and parody of the
need to justify one’s actions, the “I” reconstructed through these written forms in¬
evitably engaged in dialogue with society’s models for behavior and created its sub¬
jectivity by adjusting its image to the “community’s gaze.”35 In this adjustment,
historical subject became literary artifact. The dialogic dynamic between individual
self-representation and institutional norms produced texts that were fraught with
tension as authors acknowledged the centrality of real or inferred readers who in some
manner judged the accounts according to recognized standards. The text thus inher¬
ently carries a petition—tangible or spiritual—and an apologia pro vita sua. As we have
seen in other chapters in this book, the posturing often vacillates between the exem-
plarity of the self represented and the manipulation of the reader; the author attempts
to implicate the reader in the process of the apology and to locate the conception of
truth in her own reconstruction of self and world.
Just as important as the public nature of autobiographical accounts, period auto¬
biographical and pseudo-autobiographical forms depended on whether the subject
was a man or a woman; writing about the self was a highly gendered practice. The
emerging awareness of the individual and his or her subjectivity, new definitions of
gender roles based in part on Counter-Reformation teachings, and innovative narra¬
tive forms made possible the literary construction of new identities. Three main

(male) soldier/conquistador’s memoirs; the picaresque novel, which, as we saw in

the last chapter, could have male or female fictional characters but was usually penned
by a man; and the spiritual autobiography, which was a predominantly feminine mode
of writing but men also wrote in this form.36 A study of the inherent petition at the
core of most autobiographical writing from the period and of the ideological im¬
pulse and gender-bound prescriptions that accompany each subgenre, reveals how
Catalina’s tale uses first-person narrative genres to fashion an identity that was par¬
ticularly suited to her own lack of religious vocation and urge to see the world beyond
the cloister. The reader witnesses a hybrid gender and genre as Catalina undergoes a
transformation from a traditional Basque girl educated in the convent to a New World
soldier and outlaw, and, finally, to a celebrated European hero. (In fact, the Vida i
sucesos ends with her successful petitions to king and pope.)
150 NOT QUITE SINNERS

Gender and Genre in the Vida i sucesos

As the account opens, Catalina’s story is firmly inscribed into the literary form of
the soldier’s tale. Although vidas de soldados rarely were published in their own time,
surely Catalina would have been familiar, after so many years in the army, with the
form of the petition of merits and services and with the relation, which proliferated
during the first century and a half of the Hapsburg Empire.37 Like her comrades,
the one-time alferez simply states the year and place of her birth, and her parents’
names.38 And yet, Catalina quickly departs from this explicitly male genre: she must
deal with her biological sex in order to live and write a soldier’s life story. Altering
the conventional narrative sequence that moved from humble origins to a vagabond’s
existence before finding a military vocation, the author slows the narrative tempo
and describes her escape from the female environment of the cloister, along with her
process of gender reconstruction through a three-day sewing project in which she
makes herself a set of man’s clothing (chap, i).39
Once outwardly transformed, Catalina returns to the conventional narrative
structure, content, and tone for the soldier’s tale. Generally boasting a streamlined
anecdotal focus on the narrator, rather than the larger historical context, these nar¬
ratives are structured according to episodic stories with a clear ending (historias cerradas),
as the protagonist moves from place to place.40 The style reflects oral paradigms first
designed for telling the story to others in the tavern or camp, and later adding the
type of information needed to make a petition, such as names, titles, monetary sums,
and distances traveled. Control of information and a listing of life accomplishments
dominate many accounts. Content generally echoes social and military codes for
soldiers: tales of heroic deeds, short descriptions of places, and accounts of defend¬
ing personal honor and status—often dealing with women, dress, and titles.41 Cri¬
tiques of church and society are frequently interpolated into these documents, but
the biting satire and pessimism characteristic of period picaresque novels do not
dominate.
Catalina recounts with notable economy several years of wanderings in Spain
before embarking for America. Once there, leagues traveled, cities visited, posts held,
and money received (and lost), as well as occasional ruses and vicissitudes, dominate
the account. Movement is rapid—in both actual travel and narrative tempo—while
description is slight. After several misfortunes as a clerk, Catalina admitted her wan¬
derlust, and joins six hundred men to fight on the Chilean frontier against the
Mapuche (chap. 5). There she was banished to the trenches for interfering with her
brother’s love life and, later, received the title of ensign for her heroism in one battle
(chap. 6). In one of the few purely epic accounts in the narrative, Catalina describes:

We all joined forces with him, and five thousand men camped on the open
plains of Valdivia with a great deal of discomfort. The Indians captured
and attacked said Valdivia. . . . Seeing them make off with it [the standard/
flag], I and two other mounted soldiers went after it through a great mul¬
titude, charging and killing and being wounded in turn. Soon one of the
three fell dead. The two of us kept on, and we got to the standard but a
 Catalina de Eruaso

lance thrust felled my companion. I, with a bad wound in the leg, killed the
cacique who had it in his possession, took the standard away and spurred
my horse, charging, killing and wounding indiscriminately; badly injured,
pierced by three arrows and with a very painful lance wound in the left shoul¬
der, I finally reached our men and then fell from my horse. ... I became
the ensign of Alonso Moreno’s company, the first captain I had known,
and I was very pleased.42

In an epic-like rendering of the incident, Catalina became a heroic conquistador,

demonstrating valor and loyalty to the Crown by risking life and limb for the flag.
After more than five years in Chile, Catalina left the battlefield, because she
accidentally killed her brother in a duel. She headed for El Dorado, La Plata, Potosf,
and Cuzco to make her fortune. Catalina recalls a near-death experience when cross¬
ing the Andes (chap. 7), working in transporting goods (chaps. 9 and 11), aiding
sheriffs with law and order (chaps. 8 and 14), and defending Lima in a naval battle
against the Dutch (chap. 17). Such heroic deeds, however, soon lead into stories
about Catalina being forced out of towns, often after killing a man in a duel over
a woman or a gambling dispute. As an outlaw, Catalina often took refuge in
churches. Yet the narrator mocks church practices: She talks of it “raining priests”
when at one point she is condemned to the gallows (chap. 12). Later she praises
the Lranciscans who taught her to hide the consecrated host (believed to be the
actual body of Christ) in her hand in order to be moved from a jail to a church,
where she could take sanctuary from the law.43 Like other conquistadors, Catalina
recounts her merits, but she does so with sketchy—and often dubious—detail and
more than a touch of irony. She clearly shuns the colonization and evangeliza¬
tion projects of the Crown: “The governor wanted crops to be planted there in
order to make up for the lack of supplies we had with us, but the infantry refused
to do this, saying that we were not there to plant crops but to conquer and get
gold.”44
While maintaining the often lively, action-orientation of the soldier’s vida, not
yet a quarter of the way into her story, Catalina undermines the soldier’s petition.
Whereas many recount vicissitudes and failings, often criticizing certain aspects of
society in the process, rarely is a soldier’s tale so blatantly transgressive.45 Randolph
Pope argues that soldiers’ stories evolved over time from the early modern didactic
portraits of exemplary knights (caballeros) to the somewhat contradictory self-portraits
by soldiers from the Thirty Years’ War who variously embody characteristics of a
loyal vassal and an unrepentant rogue.46 In the opening pages of his memoirs, for
example, Catalina’s contemporary Domingo Toral y Valde's proclaims that he was
“traveling through Spain like another Lazarillo de Tormes.”47 By Pope’s calculation,
twenty years after the completion of Catalina’s Vida i sucesos, the first soldier’s ac¬
count written for pure entertainment was published. Estebanillo Gonzalez’s Relation
de vida (1646) proposes to simply “give pleasure to the reader” and depicts a soldier
as a buffoon who fills his account with satire.48 The reader who sought entertain¬
ment increasingly replaced the superior who might have rewarded the narrator for
exemplary service.49
152 NOT QUITE SINNERS

Written in the midst of this paradigm shift from an account of services ren¬
dered to a collection of roguish stones, Catalina’s Vida i sucesos may focus on the epic
and transgressive aspects of her life story for the reader’s delight. Her formal peti¬
tion had been submitted, and perhaps granted, by the time this lively account was
drafted.50 This might further explain why Catalina’s Vida has no clear petition or
specific addressee and shares a good deal with her Madrid counterpart, the Thirty
Years’ War soldier, Alonso de Contreras, who wrote a story of his years as alferez and
rogue.51 Like Catalina, Contreras first presented his relation de meritos and then wrote
his Vida within years of hers (ca. 1630), and there is no direct petition or addressee?2
The ideology of exemplarity gave way to less didactic storytelling in these two sol¬
diers, who, coincidently, may both have been in Madrid in 1624 and heard of each
other. The effect of gender on the genre, however, changed the outcome of the pro¬
tagonists’ lives. Whereas Contreras was knighted into the military Order of Malta,
Catalina no longer could follow a military career, in spite of demonstrating her ca¬
pacity for it and being granted a license to live dressed as a man.
Like Contreras’s brawling story, Catalina’s describes a society in flux and a moral
practice that did not match the one being promulgated by the Council of Trent.
Indeed, in Catalina’s case, the source of many anecdotes is the patriarchal formation
of a society in which men all too quickly drew their swords because of pride and
boasting, and women were seen as objects to be married off or to be kept safely
enclosed from other men. As Michele Stepto points out, a substratum permeates the
text, one that parodies masculine culture, especially men who make great claims with¬
out corresponding actions.53
In fact, the inherent petition for monetary reward or recognition in many sol¬
diers’ accounts is all but absent in Catalina’s life as the language and content of the
picaresque tale are intertwined with the story.54 The narrator seems to ask for rec¬
ognition of her cleverness in extracting herself from compromising situations. Writ¬
ing when the picaresque was already a well-established genre, Catalina’s Vida shares
with it an emphasis on an unrepentant rogue. Although, as in Ursula Suarez’s case,
Catalina does not share the plcaro’s story of illegitimate birth and life on the margins
of society, the text echoes the genre’s lexicon (“pfcaro cernudo,” chap. 12), ideol¬
ogy (the mockery of hard work in favor of “industria,” or cleverness, chap. 10),
and plot (the protagonist moves from master to master living by her wits). Much
of the narrative plays with Catalina’s hunger for adventure and sexual desirability
that led to the need for a quick wit, sword, and escape, as well as the resulting
hand-to-mouth existence. For example, Catalina’s first master in the New World
asked her to marry his mistress (chap. 3). Although reminiscent of the situation
that the popular fictional rogue Lazarillo de Tormes found himself in at the end
of his tale, the Vida i sucesos rewrites the model (perhaps because nature dictated
it); Catalina rejected the offer and moved on to a new post and master: “One should
know that this Doha Beatriz de Cardenas was my master’s particular lady, and he
wanted to be sure of both of us: me to serve him, and she for his pleasure. . . . One
night she locked me in [her room] and declared that in spite of the devil I had to
bed her. . . . Later I told my master that there was no way I would marry her; not
for all the world would I do it. He persisted in this matter and promised me moun-
 Catalina de Eruaso

tains of gold.”55 Indeed, the author seems to purposely inscribe the action into the
picaresque genre with two key elements: the discourse of poverty and the discourse
of sexuality.56
Catalina’s ambiguous gender role pushes literary conventions to new limits. As
we studied in the last chapter, a male picaro generally lived by his wits and actions.
If he had rights to a woman, he often used her sexual desirability to better his eco¬
nomic situation, but rarely is his own sexuality directly at stake.57 A pfcara, on the
other hand, lived by her wits and her sexual attractiveness in order to dupe men and
advance her own situation. Drawing on both picaro and pfcara prototypes, the pro¬
tagonist of the Vida i sucesos blends the female protagonist’s use of sexual innuendo
with the male’s tendency to use women and fall back on quick action to escape a
tight spot. Catalina became the object of sexual desire, like her female counterparts,
but took action to remedy the situation, like her male counterparts. The ambiguity
of her gender categorization and the genre’s possibility for either a male or female
central character allow Catalina, who in some aspects is both a male and female pro¬
tagonist, to create a humorous tension in standard narrative genres.
Catalina’s story fits surprisingly neatly into the rogue’s tale, while also in some
ways subverting the typical outcome. Avoiding the fate of most plcaros, who be¬
come the butt of their own jokes through the comic distance created in the narrative
and, thus, remain firmly marginalized by society, Catalina became famous through¬
out secular and ecclesial society. Her story reached the archbishop and viceroy of
Lima in the New World, as well as the Crown and the Vatican in the Old. In addi¬
tion, she received her share of the family estate, an honorable title, and remuneration
for military service.58 And yet, in the end, Catalina chose to return to the road—a
choice the picaro rarely had. Catalina’s trajectory was unique: her story began with
enclosure in a well-to-do family and convent in the Basque region; it moved into the
public arena of the tavern and military life in the periphery of the Spanish Empire;
it jumped into the centers of power for the viceroyality of Peru and, after a brief
hiatus in a Lima convent, the elite arena of the courts of Madrid and Rome. Ulti¬
mately, it returned to a relatively anonymous itinerant life in the Indies, when she
chose to travel the roads between Veracruz and Mexico City as a muleteer. Was it
only in the vast uncolonized areas between New Spanish city centers that Catalina
could live easily?
Notably, Catalina in many ways can only borrow the picaro/a’s story to employ
her transgressive acts because she lacks the essential keen sense of marginalization
and pessimism that are key to the genre. Undermining the inherently conservative
ideology of the genre, which was to maintain the status quo, Catalina de Erauso
overcame financial straits and triumphed in her gender choice. Although several critics
have read Catalina’s success as completely dependent on her masculinist/macho rheto¬
ric and her recapitulation of patriarchal society, one epitomized by the soldier s and
rogue’s tales, such readings overlook the reworking of these literary forms and, thus,
their accompanying ideologies.59 The author capitalizes on the ambiguity of truth
that characterizes picaresque plot and discourse. Essentially an ironic mode, things
are not what they seem, and multiple readings are possible in most situations. Lan¬
guage boasts its own unreliability in revealing any inherent, transcendent truth. As
154 N0T Quite sinners

we saw with Ursula Suarez, taking its form and structure from confessional litera¬
ture, the picaresque turns convention on its head, secularizing the narrative, and cre¬
ates a protagonist who repeats offenses rather than repents.60 Catalina’s tale suggests
that the geography and politics of the Spanish colonies were fertile terrain for creat¬
ing a hybrid gender and tale.
The final chapters of the Vida i sucesos flaunt a different type of gender-genre
blurring, one based on the most popular feminine life writing form. With the excep¬
tion of a few short stints in jail, Catalina escaped serious consequences for her illegal
acts. But by about 1619, she came face to face with the bishop of Guamanga after
killing “El Nuevo Cid.”61 (The name of the opponent itself suggests an honorable,
heroic prototype that the Monja Alferez symbolically undermines.) Hard-pressed
to seek sanctuary, Catalina began to confess—even after swearing off confession in
a previous situation. The bishop had rescued her from the hands of the corregidor, and
she now had to account for her actions. In a double movement of unmasking her
true identity as a woman who had spent about ten years in the convent and a rhetori¬
cal echoing of the confessional vida de monjas, the Monja Alf erez saves her hide. Inter¬
estingly, the narrative tempo slows dramatically in this account of transformation
from outlaw to nun, underscoring the importance of the event. Whether from the
pfcara’s appreciation of a newfound comfort or the nun’s experience of an enclosed
but well-cared-for life, Catalina describes meals, rest times, and comfort as time passes
between visits to the bishop.
Catalina borrows elements from a nun’s self-representation by capitalizing on
its inherent tension for control over the interpretation of the story told. The account
is at once apologetic and didactic, a petition for absolution of sins and an illustra¬
tion of God’s presence in her life. To understand Catalina’s use of the genre, it is
useful to recall from our discussion of Maria de San Jose that this popular autobio¬
graphical genre for women revolved around the dynamic of a triangular relationship
between confessor as judge, nun as visionary scribe, and God as divine author on the
one hand, and a somewhat linear structure of spiritual conversion, transformation,
and progress on the other. Moreover, there is a clear focus on the role of the body in
nuns’ autobiographical writings. The account of epic struggles found in the male
conquistador’s writings transform into women’s heroic battles against individual and
community sins in the pursuit of divine union and salvation. Action and evangeliza¬
tion become renunciation of the body’s passions in order to receive divine gifts and
take on suffering for the good of the church as a whole. Spiritual conversion required
a vow of chastity which, in turn, could lead to a religious life and great change. Written
accounts of this transformation tended to emerge only upon request of the confes¬
sor who witnessed—albeit secondhand—evidence of possible divine gifts or demonic
illusion. This spiritual focus and the very real mediation of the confessor set this
genre apart from the previous two we have examined in this chapter. Moreover, since
women were considered both more prone to being instruments for direct manifesta¬
tion of the divine and more in need of supervision of these gifts, this is the only
narrative genre dominated by women.
In the hands of a male author, spiritual autobiography could recount the wide
range of roles men played in society, and, therefore, much of the focus is on exterior
 Catalina de Eruaso

transformation and individual autonomy.62 The most famous male author of a Spanish
spiritual vida, of course, is Teresa of Avila’s contemporary, St. Ignatius of Loyola. In
fact, both Spanish saints helped found or reform a religious order, both wrote spiri¬
tual accounts of their lives, and both were canonized in 1622. And yet, while Teresa’s
spiritual Vida was published and widely imitated in the years after her death, Ignatius’s
was only published in the nineteenth century and seems to have had few imitators.
While women religious wrote frequently about their interior lives, few of their male
religious corollaries wrote. When they did write, the accounts differ dramatically
from women’s. Ignatius, for example, brings together the vida de soldado with the spiri¬
tual vida. Ignatius’s account begins with a fast-pace recounting of his military life and
travels and his lack of compliance with local authorities. On more than one occa¬
sion, Ignatius refused to confess and was banished from a town or prohibited from
confessing others until he had completed a series of studies at the university. Even
when he was recounting his conversion and decision to transform his life, in order to
create a religious order of “soldiers” for the pope (the Company of the Society of
Jesus, also known as the Jesuits), Ignatius’s narrative lacks the introspection found
in nuns’ accounts. Moreover, the fundamental structure of the vida de monja, of the
woman as escritora por obediencia, is absent: Ignatius of Loyola dictates his stories to a
scribe, and he does so at his own leisure.63 As a result, the account lacks the imme¬
diacy of the first person; it is narrated in third person.
Most of Catalina’s account follows the more masculine rendering of a life story
in terms of its focus on outward action. Like Ignatius, she recounts in a lively fash¬
ion the movement from one town to another and her differences with local clergy;
moreover, there is no direct clerical addressee. Like some of her military and roguish
counterparts, Catalina plays with confession as a necessary life account before God’s
intercessor in order to achieve salvation. On three separate occasions she confronts
confession for her misdeeds. In the first, she refuses, even as she is taken to the gal¬
lows (chap. 12). The next time, she reveals her identity as a woman to a priest who
gives her sanctuary from the law and safeguards her secret as he nurses her back to
health. But her account moves toward a more feminine rendering of a life story when
she must finally reveal her true identity, make a sincere confession, and change her
way of life.
A complex scene that mixes a true sense of recognition of the transformative power
of confessing in the presence of God, vis-a-vis a holy bishop, with a highly condensed,
parodic literary representation of an hours-long life confession (confesion general) leaves
the reader both laughing and perplexed at the meaning of this central scene:64

Sir. . . The truth is this: I am a woman, I was born in such-and-such a place,

the daughter of so-and-so, and at a certain age was placed in a certain con¬
vent with my aunt so-and-so. There I grew up, put on the habit, and was a
novice. When I was about to profess, for such-and-such a reason I left. I
went to such-and-such a place, took off my habit, put on other clothes, cut
my hair, went hither and thither; went aboard ship, put into port, went to
and fro, killed, wounded, cheated, ran around, and finally landed here, at
the feet of Your Most Illustrious Lordship.65
156 NOT QUITE SINNERS

Catalina’s account of her confession to the bishop borrows rhetorical elements from
a nun’s vida and capitalizes on its inherent tension for control over the interpretation
of the story told. The prototypical protagonist of a nun’s account—a repentant sin¬
ner overcome with cleansing tears and witnessing the manifestation of God s grace—
is absent from this account. In fact, the usual formula is inverted; after listening to
the Monja Alfe'rez’s three-hour account, the bishop’s face streams with hot tears,
and he encourages her to review her life and make a good confession: “The saintly
man was all ears: he listened to me without speaking or batting an eyelash, and when
I finished he said not a word, but wept bitterly. . . . He exhorted me to go back over
my past and to make a proper confession.”66 Some of the elements of confession as
a first step toward recognition and the need to write are present, but no true spiri¬
tual transformation or conversion is recorded.
The next scene further undermines the ideology and narrative conventions of a
woman’s spiritual autobiography. Knowing proof of her virginity will be her trump
card, Catalina capitalizes on the bishop’s marvel upon hearing her life, and she en¬
courages him to have matrons examine her. They report her status as “intact a virgin
as the day I was born.” This proof of virginity clinches Catalina’s fate. The bishop
proclaims his full support of her: “I respect you as one of the amazing people of this
world, and promise to help you in any way I can, to take care of your needs, and to
do that to serve God.”67 In short, he protects her henceforth from the law. After she
makes a sacramental confession with him, he absolves her and exhorts her to lead a
virtuous life. Catalina’s paradoxical situation as a sexually pure outlaw, however, mocks
the church’s insistence that sexual purity begets and reflects spiritual wholeness and
virtue. The textual rendition of Catalina’s confession meets the genre’s requirement
that transformation occur, but it subverts both its purpose and the outcome. Although
Catalina states she was inspired by this saintly man and apparently ceased her life of
brawls and stealing, much of the internal spiritual process of transformation is ex¬
ternalized and secularized in this confessional account. No longer strictly portray¬
ing a written record of reconciliation between individual and God, the narrative form
becomes Catalina’s safety net for her gender change. By echoing and yet radically
altering the genre’s central passage, the moment of conversion and confession that
led to a return to the community’s norms, Catalina’s spiritual transformation be¬
comes her gender (re)transformation. The confession to and absolution by the
confessor-bishop is in many ways the narrative center of Catalina’s life story. Con¬
fession both saved her from prison and, after a temporary reinstatement of the nun’s
habit, served as the springboard for legitimizing her gender choice. She records how
this unmasking of her identity was the beginning of her fame: “News of this event
spread everywhere very quickly, and people who had seen me before, and people,
both before and after, who heard my story all over the Indies, were amazed.”68
To emphasize further her inherent critique and manipulation of church and
society’s sexual and moral codes, several chapters later the author records the pope’s
own marvel and approval of her life and travels, gender, and virginity. According to
a broadside about Catalina’s life, which might be highly fictionalized, the pope even
defended Catalina against a cardinal’s criticism, saying: “Give me another Monja
Alferez and I will give her the same [permission].”69 The pope’s only request was
 Catalina de Eruaso

that she observe the commandment “Thou shall not kill.” The final chapter of the
Vida i succsos also mentions the rich and famous who wanted to catch a glimpse of the
Monja Alferez; now more than just the plebeian crowds in the streets of Lima gath¬
ered round to witness the phenomenon of the manly woman. Whereas the conven¬
tional nun s account bore witness to how a lowly woman’s life overcame the limitations
of her sex and revealed the role of the divine in it for a confessor, the Monja Alferez’s
life rewrote that formula to bear witness to how a woman could undo “natural,”
God-given gender categories with approval by the pope himself. Recording circum¬
stances like those in which her religious sisters confessed and wrote (the confession
to the bishop), but having the written version be noncompulsory (the Vida i sucesos),
Catalina is free to echo the genre’s format and change its outcome. Her story—both
in real life and in the text—is neither marginalized by society nor mediated by
eccelesial superiors; through a creative use of her notoriety, the Lieutenant Nun slipped
through established categories and constructed her own identity.70
As we have seen in previous chapters, nuns in Spanish America frequently ma¬
nipulated the form of spiritual autobiography to redefine within the genre’s limits a
role for themselves in the church. Madre Marfa de San Jose’s fight for spiritual au¬
thority, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s argument for women’s learning, and Ursula
Suarez’s presentation of a santa comediante reveal women who studied the genre and
pushed its limits in order to critique the often straight and narrow path that Catho¬
lic Church hierarchy prescribed for religious women. All three nuns talk of God-
given vocations (inclinas tones) and the Divine as the omnipotent author of lives (and,
by extension, their texts). Catalina completely undoes these generic underpinnings:
first by stating a purely secular “inclination” to adventure that required cross-dressing,
and then by authorizing her life with human personages. While convent sisters re¬
main cloistered, traveling only occasionally by mystic transport to evangelize or
prophesize, Catalina exploits the power accorded to virgins, rewrites central elements
of the conversion narrative, and returns to the Americas as Antonio de Erauso.71 Some
years later, a friar who met Erauso in Veracruz, Mexico, describes her: “In male garb,
with sword and dagger, the sword guard of silver, a few limp hairs for a beard, and
she was the boldest of the bold. She had a great mule train and blacks with whom
she brought clothing to Mexico.”72
In destabilizing the transcendent meaning of confessional literature, altering the
male soldier’s tale, and employing ruses common to both the pfcaro and pfcara, the
Vida i sucesos goes beyond the simple blurring of literary and gender conventions and
creates a complex, at times ambiguous, text. Competing motives undermine tradi¬
tional paradigms with their narrow embodiment (both literal and figurative) of self-
representation and identity. Although all autobiographical writing of the period tends
to be a hybrid genre that moves between petition and authority, author and addressee,
historical person and literary construct, the Vida i sucesos manipulates genres and their
inherent gender-related rules to create a truly unique text, one that even has a first-
person narrator who fluctuates between using feminine and masculine adjectives to
describe herself or himself.73 In the same years that the soldier-poet Alonso de Ercilla
revised the epic tradition when talking about battles on the Chilean frontier and the
ex-soldier Miguel de Cervantes parodied idealized literature by mixing it with more
158 NOT QUITE SINNERS

realistic elements to create a new narrative genre, Catalina de Erauso’s life story worked
with European legal codes and literary genres to create a new identity and narrative
type for the cross-dressed woman living on the American frontier.
\

Hagiographic Rewritings?

Upon her death in 1650, Catalina's story both continued in the same titillating vein as
the Vida i sucesos and took a more didactic turn. As we saw in the publications of the
1620s, the popular contemporary literary response to Catalina’s life was the retelling of
the singular acts of her story in two broadsides while Montalban’s theatrical rendition
of it focused on her cross-dressing and love triangles. In the mid—seventeenth century,
a posthumous third and final broadside maintained yet reframed the transgressive focus
of Catalina’s tale, while a chapter that formally incorporated her biography into the
historiography of Chile completely changed the facts.
This 1653 broadside is one of the few documents that recounts the final twenty
years of Catalina’s life. Whereas the first two broadsides unabashedly recount the
first thirty-some years of her life and her singular acts as a cross-dressed woman, the
third both borrows conventions for hagiographic biographies of religious women
and centers on Catalina’s audacity. The titles are telling of this shift: the first, Relation
prodigiosa de las grandes hazanas; y valerosos hechos que vna muger hizo en quarenta anos que sirvio a
Su Majestad... [The prodigious relation of the great deeds and brave acts which a
woman did in forty years of service to His Majesty], changes to Ultima y tercera relation
en que se haze verdadera del resto de la vida de la Monja Aljerez, sus memorahles virtudes) y exemplar
muerte en estos Reynos de la Nueva Espana [Third and last relation in which is truly told
the rest of the life of the Ensign Nun, her memorable virtues and exemplary death in
this kingdom of New Spain].74 After announcing its hagiographic intentions—the
telling of virtue and a good death—the narrative launches into the details of a pro¬
hibited love affair: Catalina purportedly fell in love with a woman, offered to pay
her dowry and to enter the convent with her, and challenged the woman’s other suit¬
ors to duels. While the text even documents the case by quoting a letter referring to
the matter, next to nothing is said about other events during the nearly twenty-year
period it covers; the broadside’s central piece is a story of unrequited, prohibited
love. The narrative ends with a single formulaic hagiographic statement about the
Monja Alferez’s fasts, penances, observance of sacraments, and virtue, and another
about the bishop’s recognition of her status as “marvelous woman.”75
The title and brief conclusion contradict the substance of the story, revealing
on the one hand a continued interest in telling an engaging tale so evident in the Vida
i sucesos and on the other a clear attempt to frame it within conventional, posthu¬
mous biographical accounts of women. Perhaps times had changed, or, more likely,
since the first Relation was republished in 1653 as well, the death of the biographical
subject required a certain idealization or reincorporation of the individual into Catho¬
lic norms, to better institutionalize her story. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the broad¬
side says Bishop Palafox y Mendoza tried to obtain the Monja Alfe'rez’s remains in
order to bury them in Puebla. By the time Catalina died, however, Bishop Palafox
had been recalled to Spain. This apocryphal account, then, further illustrates how
 Catalina de Eruaso

women would often be associated with an already institutionalized figure in order

to promote their acceptance into the ranks of outstanding individuals whom could
be promoted as symbols of identity.76
The Jesuit Diego de Rosales’s Historiageneral del reino de Chile (chap. 37), leaves no
ambiguity about the reinterpretation of Catalina’s life; he rewrites nearly every event,
casting her in the role of a perfecta religiosa, one with a true vocation but who goes
astray before ultimately returning to the cloister and rejoicing.77 Echoing conven¬
tional language used to describe the mystic brides of Christ that we saw with Santander
y Torres’s descriptions of Madre Marla de San Jose, Rosales transforms the woman
soldier into the wounded lover found in The Song of Songs. She goes to the mountains
to suffer monthly periods, wear hair shirts, and observe fasts and long for confession
and renewal. Catalina is the wounded deer (sierva herida), wounded by the arrow of
divine love, taken quite literally to be the near mortal wounds she suffered in battle.
Unable to bear separation from her Divine Spouse after her sinful deeds, Catalina
searches out confession, “like another Mary Magdalene.” Inscribed into the tradi¬
tional conversion narrative, this account contrasts sharply with the tone of this same
scene in the Vida i sucesos: “Bathed in tears like another Magdalene, she departed,
determined to pay no attention to the Pharisee’s and the world’s slander, to pros¬
trate herself at the feet of Christ to wash them with tears from her eyes and dry them
with her hair; she fell at the learned man’s feet. . . and begged him with many tears
to hear her confession; recounting the events of her entire life, weeping all the while,
she resolved not to leave there until she was on her way to the convent.”78 After throw¬
ing herself at the bishop’s feet, confessing her sins, and professing her faith, the Monja
Alfe'rez ends her days in the cloister observing a “holy life.”
Why such a drastic rewriting of Catalina’s life? Once again the ideology of the
genre may have influenced the story’s outcome. Montalban’s theatre piece, for ex¬
ample, follows dramatic conventions of the period: the love triangle in the comedia de
enredo ends with a marriage that at least partially restores the status quo. Rosales’s
formal history adheres to church historiographical conventions and restores Catalina
to prescribed behavioral models for women. As Stephanie Merrim notes, Catalina is
remade into an exemplary figure; moreover, as a Jesuit who was writing about a woman
that confessed first to a fellow Jesuit, Catalina’s “marvelous” (prodigiosa) story is co¬
opted for the history of the order’s role in colonizing Chile.79 Rosales follows the
same pattern we observed in the Jesuit-authored hagiographic biographies of Catarina
de San Juan and Sor Juana: their stories help establish the order’s role in developing
a strong Christian identity in the New World.

The Spanish American Frontier and Social Mobility

Studying the literary context and construction of Catalina’s Vida and its rescripting
in other sources reveals the encoding of life stories according to narrative purpose,
addressees, and gender. But given the questionable authorship of the autobiography,
it is debatable whether one can make claims beyond the literary realm—especially
since new versions of the Vida have surfaced and more may appear in the future as
scholars cull the Spanish archives. Previous texts examined in this book illustrate how
l6o NOT QUITE SINNERS

thousands of religious women lived and worked within church roles. Does Catalina’s
life story reflect a larger reality and response by women or society as a whole? Focus¬
ing on the outcome of Catalina’s petitions, Mary Elizabeth Perry concludes that
Catalina’s life “can be analyzed more effectively as a symbol than as a person.”
Catalina’s transformation from outlaw to hero was possible because her life embod¬
ied the values of patriarchal society that condoned a man’s right to defend his honor.80
But what of Catalina’s initial decision to reject the options of marriage or the veil—
options that were open to her as a well-born Spaniard, options her four sisters chose—
and her subsequent choice to cross-dress and follow in the footsteps of her four
brothers who left for America and held good military and administrative positions
there?81 And, how did the reality of establishing rule in a land thousands of miles
from the Crown affect the roles of women? Surely, just as the reality of the Spanish
soldier-poet, Alonso de Ercilla’s years fighting the Mapuche influenced his epic tale,
the reality of life on the frontier of the viceroyality of Peru influenced Catalina’s
story. No doubt it is significant that the majority of Catalina’s tale as a secretly cross-
dressed woman took place in nonurban areas of Peru, and that even after receiving
papal permission to remain in male garb, she chose to return to America and, what
is more, to a new viceroyalty and to a career that did not require permanent resi¬
dency in a city.
In their searches to answer some of these questions, Perry and Merrim have turned
up few cases of cross-dressing in Spanish historical records and see most of the cases
in literary sources as a means to an end for women to regain honor or lovers.82 Merrim
also discusses how Spanish tradition and moral codes seem to have severely restricted
cases of manly women, even as they flourished in England, particularly in the form
of the female soldier.83 In Spain, as Encarnacion Juarez notes, Moorish women took
up arms in the rebellion in the Alpujarras. Helen Nader’s new work on the fifteenth-
century Mendoza noble-women also is highly suggestive; it brings to light the vari¬
ety of roles played by some Spanish women: she notes that women in this family
held positions in the court, managed estates, and traveled to England in order to
evangelize. Looking at the radically different context of the Americas, Susan Midgden
Socolow gives a general background of a range of activities colonial Spanish Ameri¬
can women participated in, while Carmen Pumar Martinez sketches portraits of
women of Spanish descent who made their mark in the New World as colonizers,
governors, explorers, and soldiers.84
Establishing rule in a land thousands of miles from the mother country created
conditions that often allowed women to take over for husbands who died, as in the
case of the adelantada, Isabel de Barreto, or to work alongside their lovers as nurses
and soldiers (since wives were often absent), as in the cases of Ines Suarez and Maria
Estrada who accompanied the conquerors of Mexico and Chile, respectively. How¬
ever, Pumar Martinez only mentions one case of a woman living for years in com¬
plete disguise as a man: Catalina de Erauso.85
Other period accounts talk of temporary cross-dressing in Spanish America.
Nuns in one of the large convents in Lima dressed as men for theatrical performances,
despite the bishop’s prohibition of such events.86 The Historia de la Villa Imperial de
Potosi, tells stories of women in the silver-mining frontier lands of Peru who exchanged
 Catalina de Eruaso 161

skirts for trousers and left home, although many were forced to return.87 Perhaps as
Julia Wheelright demonstrates in her study of women in the military, we don’t have
more accounts of women leading nontraditional lives because women often were
erased from the historical record or portrayed as amusing freaks of nature. This is
especially important to consider in conjunction with Diane Dugaw's observation that
female warrior types flourished in England when the military was not centralized;
with the more organized Victorian army, women began to disappear from the ranks.88
On the frontiers of the Spanish Empire, the military was anything but centralized.
Catalina’s Vida i sucesos itself hints at the often ad hoc nature of conquest, defense,
and rebellion quashing. At the turn of the seventeenth century, companies were raised
and entradas (expeditions of volunteers paid around 200 pesos to set out and conquer
or control new lands) were sporadically formed (chap. 5). Furthermore, the memoirs
note how few people actually lived on the frontier, and, therefore, the welcome the
soldiers received: “Because of the scarcity of people in Chile we were well received.”
Indeed, the Jesuit historian Rosales who rescripted Catalina’s role in Chilean history
complained bitterly in the text about the difficulty of controlling the large number
of women who moved from camp to camp with the soldiers in Chile; soldiers brought
along servants and lovers.89
Beyond the lax military organization and the sparse population in some areas,
Spanish America also broke every rule set by Madrid regarding marriage, dress, caste
systems, and other customs. For example, although canon law required a couple to
be married before a priest, historians believe that almost 40 percent of Spanish
American couples living together in the seventeenth century were not officially mar¬
ried. Recall, for example, that despite Sor Juana’s illegitimate birth, she became part
of the viceregal court and, later, the convent, although the latter in theory required
nuns to be born to a married Christian couple. Likewise, according to the Spanish
Inquisition, Catarina de San Juan’s biography was to be banned immediately, but it
took four years to go into effect in Mexico. As the final stages of conquest came to
an end and Spanish Americans and native Americans set about organizing life in new
racial, geographical, political, and religious contexts, much of society was in flux.
Colonization and redistribution of power and resources often created a fluid society
that contradicted period documents and edicts written by elite Spaniards who spoke
of control and rigid legal and moral codes. Historians note the at times dramatic
socioeconomic transformation of seventeenth-century Spain. And the further one
lived from the centers of power, often the more fluid the social mobility and inter¬
pretation of the law.
Catalina, who for many years lived hundreds of leagues from the center of the
viceroyality of Peru, which itself was not within easy reach of Madrid, may have found
it more easy to pass undetected as a man, and may possibly have had female com¬
rades who never made it to Madrid to tell their own stories and publicize them.
Catalina’s accomplishments as alferez and renowned outlaw, and her skill at manipu¬
lating the system, may have catapulted her into a position of telling her story and
gaining fame, while other military women's lives may have never been documented.
It took nearly twenty years for Catalina’s true identity to be revealed to the authori¬
ties who would help publicize it. As the narrator of the Vida i sucesos boasts ironically
162 not quite sinners

after a close call with the law: “Miracles like this often happen in these types of conflict,
and more so in the Indies, thanks to refined cleverness.”90 Her account outdoes the
roguish tales of many combatants in the Thirty Years' War; after nearly twenty years
in America, Catalina’s life reflected the lawlessness, rebellions, mobility, and search
for riches that characterized early-seventeenth-century Peru.
Such social, religious, and political upheaval and flux lent itself to itinerant lives,
changes in positions, and, perhaps, identity. In the end, given this fluidity, was
Catalina’s cross-dressing less of an anomaly in her times than we have believed until
now? Only more archival research will help answer this question. The work done in
the last fifteen years to restore the most famous colonial woman, Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz, to the context of New Spanish culture—in particular, illuminating her par¬
ticipation in a widespread convent culture—provides an encouraging precedent. By
studying documents by many religious women writers, we have been able to appre¬
ciate Sor Juana’s role in an active feminine textual context. If more stories of cross-
dressed military women in the New World are found, they may reveal that Catalina
opted for a path that other women followed out of necessity or ambition; we may
also see that, like Sor Juana, her story stands out because of the circumstances that
aided its sensationalization: a bishop’s request, strong political ties through Basque
comrades, combined with her own ambition, creativity, and adequate training to
petition both king and pope.
While the actual number of female comrades in the military is pure conjecture
at this point, we do know that in the first Chilean literature from the colony, Ercilla
talks of guerrillas and Amazonian archetypes on the Araucano frontiers. And the
popular sixteenth-century romances of chivalry often included cross-dressed women
who temporarily donned men’s clothing to restore their honor. In Europe, Queen
Isabel La Catolica dressed in armor to enter Granada upon its surrender and Chris¬
tine of Sweden abdicated her throne to live as a Catholic in Rome, often dressed as
a man. For its part, the church had sainted several women soldiers, such as Joan of
Arc, who demonstrated patriotic Christian behavior.91 Catalina’s petition to the king
for reward states that she fought for him and for the Catholic faith, against infi¬
dels.92 In fact, as Stephanie Merrim notes, Catalina took quite literally Teresa of Avila’s
advice to her nuns to be “more manly” in their behavior.93
While legend credits Rosa de Lima with invoking divine intercession to defeat
the Dutch fleet that laid siege to Lima's port in the first decades of the seventeenth
century, Catalina’s Vida i sucesos describes a cross-dressed woman soldier fighting on
a flagship that was sunk in one of these naval battles. One with hands folded in prayer,
the other with musket in hand, Rosa and Catalina soon received popular and insti¬
tutional approval for their roles in defending the king’s empire and aiding the Catholic
faith—Rosa because of her holiness, Catalina because of her bravery and creative
rebellion. In the end, Rosa had many followers—although most had to be enclosed
in the cloister to gam recognition—while Catalina seems to have had few that have
been documented. In the final analysis, Catalina de Erauso’s life and text may raise
more questions than it answers. Examined in all its nuisance and contradiction, it
parades before us ambiguities about gender and genre and about legal and ecclesial
codes. It suggests a relatively unstudied fluidity in Spanish American society and
 Catalina de Eruaso

institutions. The Vida i sucesos urges us to reexamine our assumptions that women
had to follow the narrow dictates of moral and religious treatises on proper femi¬
nine behavior in the seventeenth-century Hispanic world.

Chronology of Catalina de Erauso

Note: There are many discrepancies between the dates given in the Vida i sucesos and
other documents. The Vida states that Catalina was born in 1585 and embarked for
America in 1602, but a baptismal certificate puts her birth around 1592, and another
document states she sailed for America in 1605. See Rima de Vallbona’s extensive
footnotes in her edition of the Vida, which are based on her own extensive research
and Ferrer’s work.
1585/1592 Baptized Catalina de Erauso in San Sebastian, Spain.
Age 4 Enters the Dominican convent in San Sebastian where her aunt
was prioress.
Age 15? Escapes convent.
1602/1605 Embarks for America.
ca. 1605 In Lima enlists as a soldier to fight on the frontiers of Chile.
1608 Awarded title of Ensign (Alferez) after the Battle of Puren.
1615 Fights in the battle against Joris van Spilbergen in Lima’s Port of
Callao.
ca. 1619 Confession to Bishop of Guamanga, Augustin de Carvajal.
ca. 1620 Enters the Convent of the Sanfisima Trinidad in Lima.
1624 Returns to Spain.
1624 and 1625 Relacion verdadera, published in Madrid and Seville.
1625 Petition to the Spanish Crown for reward; Vida i sucesos reportedly
completed and given to an editor in Madrid.
1626 Perez de Montalban’s play, La Monja Alferez, written and per¬
formed in Madrid.
1626 Goes to Rome and receives permission from Pope Urban VIII to
remain dressed as a man.
1630 Returns to America and lives in New Spain as the mulateer
Alonso de Erauso.
1650 Dies in New Spain.
1650 and 1653 Broadsides published in Mexico.
166? Fray Diego de Rosales writes his History of Chile and includes a
chapter on Catalina (chap. 37).
1784 Manuscript copy of the Vida i sucesos made by Juan Bautista
Munoz.
1829 First edition of Vida i sucesos published in Paris by Joaquin Maria
Ferrer.
 \

Conclusions

T wo key periods in time and two geographical centers frame the lives of the women
discussed in this book. The first place and time was Lima, Peru, in the early
1620s. It was there that America’s most lauded saint, Rosa de Lima, and one of
America’s most officially approved sinners, Catalina de Erauso, came to significant
turning points in their respective paths to sanctity or notoriety. The two women had
lived within the same viceroyalty, but Rosa lived under the vigilant eyes of confes¬
sors in the capital, Lima, while Catalina roamed on the periphery of the empire, in
the Andes and on the frontiers of Chile. By the early 1620s, however, Rosa had died
and her canonization process had been halted because her followers were being in¬
terrogated by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, the Lieutenant Nun was ordered to enter
a convent in Lima. Within years, the tables turned again—returning Rosa to the
good graces of the Catholic Church and Catalina to life on the road dressed as a
man. Jn both cases, bishops, the Crown, and finally the pope himself played lmpor-
tant roles in determining the often fine line between saints and sinners. Through
these examples of the two extremes of official samt and pardoned sinner, we gain a
perspective on the other four women’s lives. \
The setting for the lives of Catarina de San Juan, Maria de San Jose, and Sor
Juana Ines de la Cruz was Spanish America’s other viceroyality, New Spain, in the
last years of 1680 and early 1690, under the energetic pastorship of the Bishop of
Puebla, Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz. Their lives illustrate the overlapping, often
contradictory relationships between institutions and individuals. While Madre Maria
eagerly sought to live like a saint, she was at first blocked from entering the convent.
Sor Juana, in contrast, was encouraged to enter the convent, even though she admits
her own motives were to pursue a life of letters in the cloister. And Catarina de San
Juan, barred from becoming a nun because of her Asian origins, was promoted by
local clergy as a symbol of holiness in Puebla. Like Rosa and Catalina in the vice-
royality of Peru, Maria’s, Juana’s and Catarina’s stories became heavily institutional-
Jzed, coopted by Church authorities who either refashioned official images for
posterity or limited access to the women’s original self-portraits by controlling pub¬
lications, portraits, and cults. Even so, the stories of their lives still made the trans¬
atlantic crossing to the Consejo de Indias in Seville ana the Court or Inquisition in
Madrid. Extraordinary cases were even taken to Rome for the pope and his advisors
to cast the definitive vote.
Perhaps the only exception to this pattern of individual lives used by authori¬
ties to establish a colonial identity is the story of Ursula Suarez. She wrote from the

164
 Conclusions

4- far reaches of the colony, from Chile, the southern-most part of the Viceroyality of
Peru, and died when the vida genre was in decline in the second half of the eigh¬
teenth century. And yet she was still subject to the local bishop for the successful
fashioning of her spiritual path. Ursula drafted a confessional account that challenges
^ the validity of the sinner-saint dichotomy. Easily the most playful of all the autobio-
graphical life accounts written, Ursula’s vida foreshadows the demise of the standard
QJ
QcJStodel for religious women. The fact that there is no trace of a subsequent biographical

£ rescripting of her life further supports this argument.

Geographically, then, these life stories move from colonial frontiers, to colonial
£ ^ centers, and on to European civic and church centers. Chronologically, they are written
^ ~r during the mid-colonial period, the high point of feminine confessional and hagio-
sjj ' ’ graphical vida production, the seventeenth century. But they have strong antecedents
- ,v in sixteenth-century Spain and overlap into the first half of the eighteenth century.
The key figures are largely the elite: Spanish and criollo male clergy and criolla women.
—- 1 And yet, a cross-dressed Basque woman and an Asian house servant also became
^exemplars for all society—indeed, at least temporarily, they were promoted as sym-
<t
bols of colonial Spanish American Christian identity. 5>
The Lieutenant Nun’s story, in particular, showcases the way in which the au/U\\'
thorities integrated deviants into the system and even celebrated them as Eeroes.Tn
/
spite of secular and ecclesiastic mechanisms put into place to monitor behavior, tol- p 0
\ erance for deviance could be high if the circumstances were right. The viceroy 's well- i */i
established practice of “I obey, but do not fulfill” (obedezco pero no cumplo') was practiced \s
in kind at many levels in the colonies. Upon receiving an edict (cedula) from the king,
the viceroy could put it on his head, then kiss it, and say “I obey, but do not fulfill.”
In this way, he did not commit the crime of refusing to obey the king (lesse majeste);
he obeyed, but did not put the law into practice. Because many laws were enacted in
Spain without a real knowledge of their consequences in America, this allowed the
viceroy to respond to the king with his own advice. No rebellion: simply precau¬
tionary advice to His Majesty.1 In the case of religious women, the distance between
official church rules and doctrines and actual practice could be great. In every case
discussed in this book, we see that the two extreme designations of saint or sinner
set by the Catholic Church were contested and altered—at least for a time. There
t- were dramatic reversals in judgment of the lives and works of religious women, as
well as of those of their clerical superiors; recall that Sor Juana’s confessor Nunez
was a censor who had himself been censored; Catarina de San Juan’s biographer was
£
censored; and Ursula’s Suarez’s bishop was removed from office on the grounds of
disloyalty to the Crown.
Within this flux of judgments, there was an urgency among criollo inhabitants
(2r of Spanish America to create their own stories and identity. Rather than repress in¬
dividual expression, close monitoring and extensive codification of religious behav¬
£
ior appears to have encouraged self-examination and the articulation of identity in

\ colonial Spanish America. Individuals, often encouraged by church officiaTsTcom-

pared themselves to authorized models. Colonial communities used these individual
stories to claim a collective identity and to assert their parity with and even superi¬
ority to Europe.
Conclusions

In addition to seeing the influence of political and church agendas on these sto¬
ries, we have seen the effect that life-writing genres in the early modern period had
on this dynamic. Each genre had its own set of conventions and ideologies. Whether
confessional and hagiographic vidas, Inquisition and canonization testimonies, epistles
and soldiers’ stories, or new literary genres like the picaresque novel, these forms
provided a framework and heavily influenced the portrayal and goals of the life story
told.
But what happened to the use of life writings to construct religious identity after
1750, after our last protagonist, Ursula Suarez, died? Historians often identify this
period as the end of an extended religious baroque period—the ' long seventeenth
century”—and the beginning of a more secular society that reflected the ideas of the
Enlightenment and the reforms initiated by the new Bourbon monarchy in Spain.
Additional reforms came from Rome: Pope Benedict XIV, a specialist in the Con¬
gregation of Holy Rites before becoming pope, made significant changes to the can¬
onization process in 1734 and 1738 and signed an important treaty (concordat) with
the Bourbons in 1753. These eighteenth-century reforms reveal attempts both to fa¬
cilitate the process of canonization and to politicize it.2
By the mid—eighteenth century in Spanish America, the number of hagiographic
vidas published dropped dramatically, and scientific and artistic texts became the
ascendent form.3 By the nineteenth century and the post-independence years of na¬
tion building in Latin America, this secularization of society resulted in nations like
Mexico turning popular colonial saints’ feast days into secular national holidays. The
government coopted Mexico’s only canonized saint’s feast day (Felipe de Jesus, Feb¬
ruary 5) for a patriotic national holiday to celebrate the 1857 constitution.4 Secular
liberals frequently initiated strong anticlerical movements, which led to extensive
church reforms, including the closing of many convents and monasteries, and this,
in turn, contributed further to the decline of the vida,5
The close examination of religious women’s lives was deemphasized in other
arenas as well. As Emma Rivas notes, after 1750 the Mexican Inquisition turned its
focus to the new threats of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and by
1850 it had performed its last auto-da-fe.6 Nonetheless, while relatively few new can¬
onization cases were initiated after 1750, cases of local holy people already entered
into the canonization process in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries con¬
tinued to move forward, promoted by devotees in America and approved in Rome.
Since Independence, five seventeenth-century Spanish American candidates have been
beatified and four have been canonized.7
The memory of the lives of the women studied here did not die. We saw how
their lives were reinterpreted yet again in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
After Independence, Rosa became a symbol of Peruvian national identity and Catarina
de San Juan was refashioned into a popular local heroine known as the “La China
Poblana.” By the middle of the twentieth century, Marfa de San Jose’s two convents
became artifacts of colonial Mexican cultural heritage when they were converted into
museums. Late in the twentieth century, Sor Juana once again became an icon of
Mexico’s artistic achievements, while in the United States she has been discovered
as an early supporter of women’s rights. For her part, Catalina de Erauso has be-
 Conclusions 167

come a popular figure in Latin America, Spain, and the United States: she is her¬
alded as a bold sexual rebel. The only exception to this rewriting of meaning and
identity has been Ursula Suarez. Her story only reappeared in the 1980s, so the time
may yet come for her promotion as a symbol of Chilean identity. In the meantime,
Ursula’s case points to the most recent phenomenon occurring with all these women’s
stories: the rediscovery and reinterpretation of many religious women’s lives by stu¬
dents and scholars in the Hispanic and Anglo-American world. Their life stories offer
us the opportunity to broaden our knowledge of the past and of the stories that have
emerged out of it. The women and their clerical counterparts demonstrate how a
single spiritual model, the peifecta religiosa, could produce a multiplicity of lives, life
stories, symbols, and identities. A simple spiritual model, framed within conventional
religious and literary genres, created the grounds upon which a richness of voice and
experience could be expressed in the New World.
Appendixes
felections of Jife \Vritings
in translation
Appendix A

Rosa de Lima: Selections from Testimony

for the Canonization Process

From Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, ed. Kenneth Mills

and William B. Taylor (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998),
pp. 197—202.

[ We join the testimony of Don Gonzalo de la Maza at his answer to the fourth question.]
Answering the fourth question, this witness explained that he had known the
said Rosa de Sancta Maria for about five years, and he told of the personal contact
he had with her. Although this witness had wanted to make her acquaintance years
before, knowing the considerable virtue she possessed, he had not done so out of
respect for her rigorous seclusion. His first direct experience came on the occasion
when the said Rosa de Sancta Maria wrote to this witness asking him to assist her in
a charitable deed, which greatly delighted him. However, he was afraid to disturb
her tranquility, until one day soon thereafter this witness chanced to see her enter his
house with her mother, the said Maria de Oliva, and his wife, Dona Maria de Usategui.
As strangers, they [the three women] had met and spoken in the Jesuit church, for
she [Doha Maria], too, wanted to meet the said Rosa. And for much of the time
between that day and the one on which she passed from this life, he saw a lot of the
said Rosa de Sancta Maria in his house with his wife and daughters due to the spe¬
cial affection they all had for one another. Rosa’s taking of a room in this witness’s
house was favored both by her natural parents and by her spiritual fathers [her con¬
fessors], with whom she communicated. Sometimes, it was even by their orders, as
this witness learned from her confessors, Padre Maestro Lorenzana of the Order of
Saint Dominic and Padre Diego Martinez of the Society of Jesus. Through her stay
and his personal exchanges with her, this witness learned of the beginnings of her
calling.
Rosa told this witness of an incident that occurred when she was about five years
old, while she was playing with one of her brothers, Hernando, who was two years
older. Rosa [then Isabel] had grown beautiful blonde hair and [on this occasion] it
had been handled roughly and soiled by her said brother. Once she saw the state of
it, she started to cry. Her brother asked why she cried. Did she not know that on
account of [worrying over] their hair many souls were in Hell? Knowing this, she
should not be crying over her hair. [Rosa said] that this retort had so imprinted it¬
self in her heart that in thinking about it she was seized bv so great a fear in her soul
that from that moment on she did not do a thing, not one thing, which she under¬
stood to be a sin and an offense to God Our Father. From this fear Rosa gamed
172 APPENDIX A

some knowledge of the divine goodness, which helped her [understand things about]
her grandmother [who had died] and a sister, a little older than her, who died at the
age of fourteen. [Rosa was now able to see them] as souls that, in her opinion, had
been very pleasing to Our Lord, [and] whose deaths had been a great consolation to
her because the things she had seen in them and been given to understand by His
Divine Majesty convinced her that they had certainly gone to Heaven.
Thus, the said Rosa de Sancta Marfa said to this witness that at that tender age
she had dedicated to God Our Lord the gift of her virginity, with a vow [of chas¬
tity], and that, to this witness’s understanding, the great outward modesty and pu¬
rity of life attained by the said Rosa suggested she honored the said promise not
only in her deeds but also in her thoughts, as one of her spiritual fathers expressed it
to this witness. And her introspection was such that the said Rosa also revealed to
the witness that in her life she had neither seen nor longed for a feast day or worldly
celebration, not even a common procession, and that during the time that he knew
her he clearly perceived this [to be a true account of] her way of withdrawal [from
the world] and devotion. She withdrew not only from direct communication but
also from seeing people and [worldly] things in order that they might neither im¬
pede nor delay the serenity of her soul, the power of which this witness saw at that
time to be so focused that he beheld it with great admiration.
And as much [was true] in other senses, because this witness never saw her tongue
move to utter an unnecessary thing. [This was true] in her answers or advice to others,
in her praise of the Lord and in her encouragement of others to give praise. Her words
were so careful and serious that they demonstrated very well that it was God who moved
her. She was so chaste in her speech that if she said something that might be understood
in more than one sense, she added, “What I am saying” or “I wish to say.” She wanted
everyone to do the same, as was demonstrated on the occasions when other people re¬
counted something she had said or done. If [the relation of her words or acts] was not
undertaken with absolute precision, she pointed out whatever was wanting with com¬
plete courtesy, [noting] that she had said or done this [or that]. And this witness no¬
ticed this perfection of the truth in her speech until she died. [In fact, this was] so much
the case that on the very day she died, a devoted friar had come and asked one of the
people who were attending Rosa in her illness if it would be acceptable for Father So-
and-So, for whom Rosa had asked, to enter, at which point the said Rosa, though in
very great anguish and pain, spoke up, saying “I said I wished to see him before I die.”
The downward cast of her eyes was notable, so much so that this witness said
that, in communicating with her so familiarly and with such openness that he called
her his mother, it was amazing how few times he saw her lift her gaze. She was so
chaste and pure in her sensibilities that in no manner would she attend conversations
that were not spiritual and directed toward the good souls and the service of Our
Lord. And if it happened otherwise, or if some person began to speak on secular
themes, with very great modesty she attempted to divert them or absent herself from
the conversation, as this witness saw in his house on many occasions. Thus, in the
time they knew one another, it was very rare for her to go out [or be among] people
from outside the house, not counting the times in which some spiritual fathers vis¬
ited, because the whole of her interest was in retreat and solitude. . . .
 Rosa de Lima m

The day of her birth is recorded in her father’s book and the certificate of bap¬
tism. Concerning the day of her death [in order to establish her age at death], it
occurred in this witness’s house on Thursday, August 24, Saint Bartholomew’s Day,
one half hour after midnight. And after the said beginning of her calling, the said
Rosa de Sancta Maria told this witness that she scorned the things of this mortal
life, such as trying to impress people and be their object of curiosity. To manage
this, for some time she had worn the habit of Saint Francis until, at the age of twenty
or twenty-one years, she dressed in that of Saint Dommic and Saint Catherine of
Siena, her mother, whom she had wanted to imitate since the beginning of her life,
and become a nun of her order. And this witness has never heard, understood, or
seen anything which contradicts what he has said, nor anything against the virtue,
honesty, spiritual absorption, and virginal purity of the said Rosa de Sancta Marla.
This is his answer to the question. . . .
To the sixth question. . . . Although they kept secret her mortifications of the
flesh and penances until she died, this witness and his family knew of her way of life.
This witness said that from a young age she was given to mortify herself with fasts,
scourges, and other [self-inflicted] sufferings, and that from early on she had sub¬
sisted on bread and water for many days [at a time]. And, from the age of ten or
eleven years she kept to her fasts of bread and water, especially on the days that her
mother would excuse it, that is, on the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of each
week. At the age of fifteen and sixteen years she had made a conditional vow to forego
meat and to fast on bread and water for the rest of her life. . . .
This witness observed her abstinence when she lived in his house, during which
time even when she had a fever and her doctors and confessors ordered her to eat
meat, she would not do it. Her fasts on bread and water were continuous. .. . [In
fact,] this witness saw that she would go a day or two or more without eating or
drinking anything, particularly on the days when she took Holy Communion, be¬
cause at certain times of the year confessors granted permission for one to take
Communion every time one went to church, and this is what she did with much
modesty and without drawing attention to herself. During these fasts and abstinences,
[when] she left the church or her secluded room in his house, she had such color [in
her face] and showed such health [that it seemed] as if she was fortifying herself with
plenty of nutritious dishes. Worrying over her stomach pains and all that she suf¬
fered, one would ask her why she did not eat anything, to which she ordinarily re¬
sponded that Holy Communion made her feel full to bursting and that it was
impossible for her to eat [even] a bite. ... (It often happened that in ill health Rosa
would be made to eat meat and other food, especially by her well-meaning mother,
but also by doctors and her worried confessors. In this witness's experience, these
feedings had the effect of worsening Rosa’s condition.) During one of her danger¬
ous illnesses three years ago, the doctors forced her to eat meat, which left her weary
and so short of breath that she could walk no more than a few steps for many days.
She said that it [her worsened condition] had resulted from her distress at having
eaten meat, and she began getting better when she resumed her abstinence. . .. Dur¬
ing the time that the said witness knew her, the said Rosa’s manner of abstinence
was such that the amounts she ate even when she was not observing it [her fast of
174 APPENDIX A

bread and water] did not, to him, seem enough to sustain the life of a human body,
especially one so young. . . .
To the seventh question this witness answered that he knew for a fact that since
the beginning of her life the said Rosa de Sancta Marla performed continuous and
rigorous mortifications of the flesh, usually with iron chains. And this witness knew
[about these mortifications] from what he had heard from her, her mother, some of
her confessors, his wife the said Doha Marla de Usategui, and his two young daugh¬
ters, from whom even given their tender ages and the love and concern he had for
them, he did not deny exposure to [Rosa’s] virtuous example.
With the same certainty, this witness learned that for a long time she [Rosa]
had worn an iron chain wrapped two or three times around her waist and fastened
with a padlock for which she had no key. [At one point when] she was in her mother’s
house, she developed a very severe pain in her abdomen, and the chain had to be
removed in order for her to be helped. She suffered much as the lock was broken
because her skin and, at some parts, her flesh had become stuck to the said chain, as
this witness saw after Rosa’s death.
Because all of this information was communicated to his wife, the said Doha
Marla de Usategui, on the understanding that it might be told to this witness, he
also understood with the same certainty that she [Rosa] had employed different
hairshirts from her shoulders down to her knees. For a long time she had worn tunics
with sackcloth on the inside until, after two years, her confessors noticed her health
so diminished that they took them away. This witness had seen them on the occa¬
sions when she changed them and hung them out in the sun. By order of her confes¬
sors, from that time [when the rough tunics were forbidden] until the point of the
illness from which she died, her simple outfits were brought to her, on which occa¬
sions this witness also saw that she changed them.
The said Rosa de Sancta Marla sometimes told this witness and his wife and
daughters that from an early age she had greatly detested putting on a good appear¬
ance for people and the care taken by her mother in arranging her hair, face, and
clothes. Seeing that she was not getting very far [toward the realization of her ascetic
designs] with her mother, at the age of twelve years she cut off her very blonde head
of hair, at the sight of which her mother scolded her harshly. [But her quests contin¬
ued.] Feeling that her fasts and mortifications were not sufficient to drain the color
from her cheeks, she poured pitchers of cold water over her chest and back even when
she was dressed. Because of this, or because of divine will and providence, she con¬
tracted an illness at the age of thirteen years and became crippled and [had to be]
clamped to a bed by her hands and feet for a long time. [She suffered] a great pain
over her entire body that could not be explained, but in bearing it, a very great relief
and comfort came to her, in [knowing] that on account of Heaven her patience and
compliance with the divine will had never faltered. She told this witness that on this
occasion, as on others, Our Lord had rewarded her with so much pain, of a kind she
had not believed a human body could withstand. [It was] nothing like the kind [of
pain] He Himself had suffered, [she had said,] yet she was bewildered at having
enjoyed so much forgiveness from God’s hand, [considering] it was not possible that
this [reward] would be bestowed on so wretched a creature as herself.
 Rosa it Lima 175

This witness also understands it to be a certain thing [based on what he had

learned] from his wife the said Doha Maria de Usategui, and from other people,
that the bed in which Rosa slept from the age of one and a half or two years in her
partents house, [eventually] taken by her confessors, was a barbacoa, a small platforn
of rather coarse canes, like those used for threshing wheat in Spain. [It was] bound
together by leather cords, with sharp, two- or three-cornered shards of an earthen¬
ware jug scattered over it and between the said canes. .. .
And after the said bed was taken away, and put on a shelf so that the said shards
would not fall away, this witness knows that the said Rosa de Sancta Marfa nor¬
mally slept either on a plank of wood with a blanket, or seated in a small chair, as she
did the whole time she lived in this witness’s house. This witness also knew that from
the beginning of her life the said Rosa de Sancta Marfa had endeavored to punish
her body by depriving herself of sleep, and there came a time when in a day and night
she slept no more than two hours, and sometimes less. . . .
And, on the matter of her ways and mortifications, from one of Rosa de Sancta
Marfa’s spiritual fathers this witness has heard [of one of her methods] to be able to
keep praying when she was overcome by drowsiness. She set about tying together a
number of the hairs at the front [of her head], [hair’s] which concealed a crown of
thorns that she wore [underneath], [and then attaching these knots] to a nail she had
driven into the wall of her refuge. [Thus] she would be virtually hanging [there],
only able to reach the floor with difficulty. And in this way she conquered weariness
and continued her prayers. . ..
To the twenty-ninth question he answered that he has heard said that there have
been many, and very exceptional, miracles performed by Our Lord God for the greater
glory of His name and in demonstration of the virtue and sanctity of the blessed
Rosa. [By these miracles] many people with different maladies, [who] entrust them¬
selves to her intercession [by] touching some traces of her clothing and the earth
from around her tomb, have been restored to health. This witness defers to the tes¬
timonies and proof of the said miracles.
Since the day on which the body of the said blessed Rosa was buried in the chap¬
ter room of the said convent of Saint Dominic, every time this witness entered [the
chapter room] he has found a great gathering of people of all orders, stations, and sexes,
and at the tomb this witness has seen many of the sick, crippled, and maimed.
And in the same way he has observed what is [equally] well known, [namely]
the veneration and devotion which the notables of this city, like the rest of the gen¬
eral population, have for the blessed Rosa de Sancta Marfa and for the things that
were hers [and that were associated with her life]. [This is demonstrated] by the
number of people of all stations who have gathered at this witness’s house to visit
the rooms in which the blessed Rosa stayed and died. In particular, there have been
very few, if any, distinguished women who have failed to turn up in this witness’s
house to ask for relics from the clothing and other things that belonged to the blessed
Rosa. And the same [close attention] has been paid by important men; indeed, the
first one whom this witness saw request relics was Dr. Francisco Verdugo, the in¬
quisitor of this realm, and this witness sent them to him. And [then] there was the
judge from the royal Audiencia who has come twice to ask for them.
176 APPENDIX A

The demand has been such that if the tunics and habits which she left were many,
they [still] would not have been enough to share in very tiny parts among the people
who have come with such great affection and devotion. [One notes] particularly the
monks from the five religious orders and the nuns in the convents of this city, whose
request [for relics] have not been small.
The flow of people who have visited the house of Rosa’s parents in which she
grew up and lived has been of no less magnitude. [They visit] the little cell that was
her room, taking from it what they have been able to prize away and remove, even
the little latch from the door, as this witness has seen, and [even] the threshold and
planks are cut out from the room and its door. There was one time when this wit¬
ness wanted to do the same, and he visited her parents only to find so many people
and coaches and horses outside the door and in the street that he returned [home,
having been] unable to enter. . . .
What this witness had most noticed were the tears shed by many people [while]
talking about the life and things of the blessed Rosa. Some friar-confessors told him
of the exceptional conversions of souls and arduous transformations of [people’s]
lives that had occurred among those who commended themselves to the blessed Rosa
after her death. Other people, especially devout women, have told this witness they
wanted to receive the habit that the blessed Rosa had worn and to found the con¬
vent of Saint Catherine of Siena that she [Rosa] so much desired. A prelate of a re¬
ligious order, and not even the Dominicans, has told him the same thing. And this
witness knew a maiden whom he took to be very virtuous, who now was attempting
to imitate the life of the blessed Rosa. And [there are] spiritual people, very devout,
among them some friars, who have said to this witness that since the death of the
blessed Rosa de Sancta Maria they have received from Our Lord remarkable favors
and rewards, much better than those which they had received before. And this he
knows and is his response to this question.
Appendix B

Catarina de San Juan: Selections from

Compendio de la vida

From Jose Castillo de Graxeda

Translated by Nina M. Scott

Chapter i. Of the homeland\ parents, and birth of Catarina

Catarina was a native of the Mogul kingdom; the place where she was born is un¬
known, nor did she herself know it because she was so young when she left there.
Her mother was named Borta; neither was she able to tell me the name of her father
with any certainty, but rather doubtfully, and in cases of doubt, as they are not radi¬
cally certain, it is best to omit them. God gave her parents clear knowledge of His
boundless omnipotence, and as he was Creator of heaven and earth, His great power
sent them great mercies even within the heathen state in which they lived, which in
my opinion were like omens: one was to give them enlightenment and understand¬
ing by means of prodigious acts that He wished them to be saved, and after they
died the Lord informed their fortunate daughter of this; in my opinion they achieved
this joy because of their desire for baptism. (According to what has been said and to
what our Holy Mother Church teaches us, it is baptism which is called Flaminis, or
by another way which Divine Providence mysteriously possesses. . ..) The other omen
was by means of the miracles that God rendered unto them, foretelling that they
would have a daughter whom He favored even before she was born, and bestowing
repeated favors upon the parents as though in celebration of such a birth.
An example of the many which they received is the one when, Catarina having
already been conceived in Borta’s womb, the Virgin Mary appeared and told her
(according to what Catarina told me) that she would deliver a most lovely girl who
would be her daughter whom, once born, she was to raise with great care. Of this
mercy shown her mother and of many others I was told by this servant of the Lord
herself: “Look, Yr. Grace, Father, this mercies and much other things when I was
little, persons who knew and witnessed everything about me and things to do with
my parents would tell of them whenever they saw me, weeping tenderly: great people
is this girl, royal blood she has. Other things as well when I received understanding,
which Divine Majesty gave me very soon, so I knew this and am telling to Yr. Grace.”
As though she were saying: “Everything that happened to my parents at my birth,
during my upbringing, and the marvelous events which occurred when I came into
the world, I was told by persons who saw them, and though perhaps it is difficult

i77
178 APPENDIX B

for you to understand how I came to know all this and a great deal more before I
was even born, or even when I was born and was so very young, and furthermore
how can I give you an account thereof? And for this reason I reply to you that when
I came to have the use of reason and understanding—His Majesty bestowed light
and clarity onto my faculties at a very early age—many completely trustworthy per¬
sons told me thereof, and these same persons, when they regarded me carefully [when
I was] away from my homeland, never ceased looking at me for long periods of time
and would burst out while weeping tenderly: I know this little girl, who is of royal
blood. So that, Father, all I have told you of what happened is exactly how I have
told it.”
Thus any doubt anyone might have must be satisfied, as she herself has an¬
swered it.
As I said, Our Lady the Virgin Mary favored Borta with the news of her fortu¬
nate pregnancy, and, as Catalina used to tell me, the Queen of Heaven was there to
help when the birth came: “When I was come to be born or my mother to have me,
the Most Holy Virgin helped her very much, and said to her: ‘Borta, arise from your
bed and in the grass there, under the big earthen jug, go dig a hole, and you will find
riches there to bring up your little girl very well, as I am choosing her for my daugh¬
ter.’ This, Father Castillo, the people told me; if it’s true, praise, triumph and vic¬
tory, and if it’s not, curses, damnation, and to hell you will go.”
As though she meant to say: “When I was born, the Most Holy Virgin assisted
and aided my mother, and then, after I had been born, told her: Borta, as soon as you
get out of bed go to a place in your garden, and in the part where there is an earthen
jug, take it away and dig down, and you will find treasure which I am giving you so
that you take very good care of this girl for me, for I am choosing her as my daugh¬
ter. This, Father Castillo, was told me when my judgment was more mature; if it is
true, I give thanks for this event to the triumphant and militant Church, but if it is
of the devil, then of course I renounce it all.”
Borta arose from her bed after the fortuitous birth of Mirra [which means bit¬
terness], which was the first name she was given; she complied with what the Queen
of Heaven had ordered her to do by going to the appointed place, and hardly had
she begun to dig when she found the treasure hidden in the earth, the carats of whose
worth were the gift of Mary’s hand. What I mean to say is that this gift represented
the treasure trove of virtues which Mirra was destined to have, with Borta’s womb
being the center of this happy world, for she brought forth this treasure to the world.

Chapter 3. About her captivity and her baptism, and the voyages in which she was brought
to the port of Acapulco

Under the guise of traders, some pirates came to Mirra’s homeland and lay in wait
to capture some slaves; they were successful in their intentions, because in their first
encounters they found Mirra, who had gone to the seashore, either in search of soli¬
tude or because God had ordained it to happen so that she would leave that heathen
land, even at the cost of much suffering and misfortune which she would undergo
 Catarina de San Juan 179

during the voyage on which she was taken. They finally reached a port or place called
Cochin with her, where, as soon as she spied several fathers of the Society of Jesus,
she felt a little better about the troubles she had had in such a terrible calamity; she
used to tell me: “Look, Father, when they captured me and made me slave, much
worry, much cares; only Divine Majesty know what I went through, but when we
got to Cochin, other place now very far from my country, I saw Fathers from Soci¬
ety) got to know them and felt bit better, because when I saw them I remembered
when I was little girl on one occasion Divine Majesty show me many Fathers and
said: They teach you.’ That’s how it was, Father, because before they got water to
put on me for baptizing, they taught me very fine, and then a priest, with a collar
like your collar, baptized me and during baptism Most Holy Virgin, Saint Joaquin,
Saint Anne very happy in their eyes and looked at me glad and kind and I looked at
them. Name they put on me at baptismal font was Catarina de San Juan.”
As though she meant to say: “When I was the pirates’ prisoner, who made me
their slave, I had many troubles at the outset of the voyage, and God alone knows
this; but when they took me to Cochin, a port far from my own country, where I
saw Fathers of the Society of Jesus, I calmed down a bit, for as soon as I saw them I
knew who they were, for when I was still a small girl His Divine Majesty showed
them to me and said, ‘These men are to be your instructors and will guide your soul;
they will teach you before baptizing you,’ and that is how it was, my Father, because
their Reverences instructed me in all I needed to know before receiving holy bap¬
tism, which a churchman in holy garb administered; at said baptism I had the pres¬
ence of the Most Holy Virgin, Saint Anne and Saint Joaquin, who with indications
of their sovereign countenances showed great gladness, and I, with the greatest hu¬
mility and modesty I could show, gazed upon them reverently, giving thanks to the
God of Heaven and earth for everything, and for the name which they bestowed
upon me at the baptismal font, which was Catarina de San Juan.”
When Catarina had received in Cochin the baptism she so ardently desired
because of the things foretold her by Christ Our Lord and by His Holy Mother
when she was still living in a heathen state, the master in whose charge she was de¬
cided to sail to several ports until he reached Manila; during this voyage it appears
that all the furies of hell were unleashed against Catarina, causing her new afflictions
and causing her to suffer bloody strife in the mistreatment she endured in all the
places where she was taken by her master. At last she and the other slaves reached
the port of Manila; the ship’s captain took her to a house to be carefully guarded,
where she spent several days. At that time the Marquis of Galves, then viceroy of
this land of New Spain, had put in an order for several handsome, pleasing women
slaves for his palace staff, and one of the chosen ones to fill this order was Catarina,
who thus was sent to the port of Acapulco for His Excellency. But at that time there
was a great disturbance in Mexico and with it had come a change of government (as
change there was), and also in the conveyance of Catarina; the ones who had the
good fortune to receive her were Captain Miguel de Sosa and his wife Doha Margarita
de Chaves, who had ordered a correspondent of theirs to find a chinita [Asian girl] to
raise as their daughter, as their marriage had borne no fruit; thus she was sent to the
180 APPENDIX B

aforementioned couple as their slave, having been born free. But all of these were
divine intentions so that this city [of Puebla] would have an ornament of such glo¬
rious deeds as Catarina.
N

Chapter 4. Of the life she led in the home of Captain Miguel de Sosa
and Dona Margarita de Chaves

As soon as Captain Miguel de Sosa and Doha Margarita de Chaves welcomed Catarina
into their home, her fine natural gifts and heroic virtues in themselves recommended
her [to them], not as a slave but as a daughter, becoming in effect more an adopted
child, for, as soon as she came into their hands, within a few days of her arrival she
received the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation from the hand of the Most Illustri¬
ous Doctor Don Alonso de Mota, Bishop of this City of the Angels, with her own¬
ers acting as godparents.
At that time, when she must have been twelve or thirteen, Catarina showed a
sense of judgment that stemmed not from the fresh exuberance of youth but from
judicious maturity. With this, and with many other similar actions, she made her
godparents regard her carefully, all the more so when they saw in her great assidu¬
ousness for housekeeping, applying herself very quickly to this work . . . and being
extremely meticulous in everything.
Having convinced themselves of her faithfulness, her godparents had her manage
the expenses of the household; without being wasteful she yet gave liberally, and with¬
out stinginess helped those who were in her care with what she had. Her godfather
many times had proof of her loyalty and disinterestedness in material things, as often
he would intentionally let some coins fall from his desk onto the floor of his office just
to see what Catarina, who would come in to clean, would do; what she did was to look
on the coins as so much trash, for she swept up both with the same indifference, as she
held both to be worthless. Her godfather would then say to her, “Catarina, when you
were sweeping, didn’t you see the money in the trash?” And she would reply: “Me, I
did not look well, didn’t remember and if I see it, have forgotten.”
As though she were saying, “I am oblivious to everything, as I am ever mindful
that I am dust, and since that thought moves me, I pay no attention to money.”
The little store that Catarina put by money and the simplicity with which she
dealt with this matter gave her godfather much pleasure; on a daily basis, he and his
wife felt greater admiration which such examples offered.
Who would not assume that in a house of such wealth Catarina would be the
one who would come out best, as every material comfort was under her command?
And who would not think that she would lead a life of ease and leisure? But no, because
in the first case she always so subdued her flesh and was so abstemious in what she
ate that she fasted continually, eating mainly bread and water, that since her child¬
hood she had scorned those foods which are held to be delicious in taste, tending
always to the humblest sustenance, eating only what was necessary and with no con¬
diment; she preferred foods of little substance, such as vegetables and herbs, to dainty
dishes and sweet delicacies. And if on some occasion Nature led her to feel a slight
longing for something sweet, Our Lord Christ would say to her: “Catarina, what is
 Catarina de San Juan

this? My mouth is tasting gall and vinegar and yours wants something sweet?” And
she, to such delightful words, would answer Him: “No, my dearest, that is long years
gone.”
As though she meant to say: “No, my Lord and my love, I will not taste it, I will
not enjoy it, and will only enjoy that which you wish me to taste; for you I abandon
everything and only want to taste bitterness and sorrows, which is what you taste
and give to those who are your friends, and I, though unworthy, am one of those
who wants to be your slave. Sweeten me only with bitterness, taste me only with
sorrows.”
And thus she refrained from eating it, and if she did eat it, it would be when she
was ill or unwilling to eat, and then only with the express command of her superiors,
not of her own will or desire.
Speaking of the latter I could expand on this at length, but the story does not
warrant it, for I have promised to tell this life as succinctly as I can. When she had
finished her domestic duties it was Catarina’s consolation to seek out the most se¬
cret corners and the most secluded places, and, once there, on her knees and arms
extended wide, she tenderly uttered that which a heart, melted in the fire of divine
flames, might be wont to say. Sometimes it was with Christ Our Lord, another time
with His Most Holy Mother, another with other heavenly host, so that, ever more
kindled with this divine ardor and burning with divine love that gently consumed or
delicately completed her, she gave herself up to such terrible flagellations that often
times it was necessary for the angels to temper the number of strokes with which she
mortified her flesh, saying to her, “Hey, Catarina, enough.”
For this she used small iron chains, as well as hair shirts of pig’s bristles and
other various instruments with which she so imprisoned and confined her flesh and
her body that everything was a scourge of terrible self-mortification. Even though
she appeared to have a narrow bed on which she slept, the cold stone floor was her
place of rest, and when she realized that people might find out that she was not sleep¬
ing in the bed, she used a judicious ruse to make it appear that she had actually gone
to bed, but little by little she shook off the warming covers, so that her delicate skin
made use of the hard wooden planks for softness, and the stinging splinters for re¬
spite. These, and others like it, were Catarina’s ways of consolation, and she executed
them with such tenacity that I understood that at the end of her life she had accus¬
tomed herself to such a degree of discomfort and multiplicity of acts of penitence
that only divine grace could keep her on her feet, strengthening her to such a degree
that no human effort without this divine assistance could have borne the rigor with
which Catarina punished her body. . . .

Chapter 32. About an event which this servant of God\ after her death
and with God’s help; effected

On this point of the miracles which God, with Catarina’s intercession after her death,
has wrought, many things might be told and I am omitting many of them, because
the sole example I will relate is sufficient to prove them all, above all since it was
known to many people who saw it, and can give witness of it; I will omit all others,
182 appendix b

for in the matter of miracles, as they are in and of themselves so difficult to ascer¬
tain, and the preserve of the knowledge of the Church, which has this ministry by
profession, that I do not want them to become an obstacle to the credit of the vir¬
tues of this servant of the Lord, nor do I wish to extend this story, whose purpose is
but to awaken and touch the devotion of the faithful.
Before the Holy Office of the Faith, as in all matters with its holy zeal and vigi¬
lant concern, removed and forbade the likenesses which popular devotion had made
of Catarina, it so happened that the learned Francisco de Ayala, assistant in this city
to the parish of the renowned and illustrious martyr Saint Sebastian, came down with
a serious, painful, and acute illness, which was so severe and life-threatening that he
had reached the final stages thereof, with paroxysms and death throes. While in this
dangerous and painful state, a portrait of Catarina was placed on his chest, and when
he had had it with him but a short while, he began to vomit what he had in his stom¬
ach, spitting up a kind of bag of thick skin. Witnesses hereof were the doctor who
was attending him, as well as his helpers and numerous other companions, and the
said learned Francisco de Ayala was left well, in good health, and free of the afflic¬
tion because of the contact with Catarina’s portrait. I do not relate this as a miracle
done by Catarina, but as a marvelous work of God, who has the power and the knowl¬
edge when He wishes to bestow health or illness, life or death, and, having reached
the end of Catarina’s life, the author hereby concludes this brief relation.
Appendix C

Maria de San Jose: Selections from Vida, vol. i

From Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Country out in the
Carden (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 3—19.

[ Written in Oaxaca, in 2703—04, to Maria’s confessor Fray Placido de Olmedo, addressed as “your
Paternity’’ (vuestra patermdad)].
Today, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the eighth of Septem¬
ber of the year 1703:1 had already written the entire story of my life, from my child¬
hood until I set out for this foundation in this city of Oaxaca, under order of obedience
from my Confessor who was the licentiate Manuel de Barros, Chaplain of the con¬
vent of our Order of Augustinian Recollect nuns of our Mother Saint Monica, which
was a new foundation in the Indies, in the city of Puebla de los Angeles, where I
took the veil to be a nun.
This foundation was established and founded by his most Illustrious Grace Don
Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla. I had spoken with him on
a few occasions before becoming a nun, when he would go out on the visitation of
his diocese; for he always made a stop in the town of Tepeaca, which served then as
it does still as the principal place in all that valley, where all the important people
would gather who had come to see the Illustrious Lord Bishop. My parents’ haci¬
enda, which was a farming hacienda, was near the town of Tepeaca, about a half a
league away. On these occasions, I would do everything in my power to be able to
speak with him, and though very hastily, I would give him an account of the extraor¬
dinary path—which put me at such risk of being deceived by the enemy—by which
God was leading me, and of my great desire to become a nun. And though this was
but every now and then and very hasty, being such a great spiritual Father, he per¬
ceived and understood my path at once. And so, after I had become a nun, he would
come from time to time to the confessional and hear my account of my soul and
what was happening in it. When he heard my confession, he commanded me to write
my life story.
On this occasion his Illustrious Grace came to the convent and, as would be
expected, he already knew the order my Father Confessor had given me, because my
Confessor communicated all my affairs to him. I had not carried it out, because I
did not know how to write. The Bishop told me I should obey at once, without the
slightest hesitation, by beginning to write; that even though I could not write, nor
had I been able to learn how in spite of all the efforts I had made, obedience could
work miracles. Besides this, I knew it pleased Our Lord to make manifest the great
deeds that His powerful hand had worked in this lowly and wretched creature that
I have been; because in one of the favors that His Divine Majesty had granted me,

183
184 APPENDIX C

He had told me, among other things, that it was now time to proclaim and make
manifest the great deeds that He had worked in me. And thus His infinite power
and mercy might be praised and extolled, knowing that all comes from that power¬
ful hand, and that in me there has never been nor is there more than lowliness and
wretchedness.
All these things occurred before I ever began to write. I began and I went on
writing, which clearly showed the miracle of obedience. But the travail that writ¬
ing has caused me and causes me still is something for God alone, Who is the only
one Who can know it, for I can find no terms to explain the extreme travail it
gives me. When I had filled one notebook I sent it at once to my Confessor, who
as I have already said was the Chaplain of the convent. As soon as he had read it,
he carried them [sic] in person to the Bishop, Santa Cruz, who being the prelate
had made this arrangement with him. He would leave them in [the Bishop’s] hands
so that as soon as he might have time, he could read them and inspect them. His
most Illustrious Grace would then do so, and after having read them he would
consult with his Confessor, a gentleman canon who was Confessor to some of the
nuns of the convent. With this canon, who was his own Confessor, [the Bishop]
would soon return the papers and deliver them to my Confessor. Little by little
they all came into his hands. . . . [Maria continues to discuss who read her notebooks and
where they are.]
My conversion is late and lacking in response to Your loving voice, which has
called me so many times. Do not permit me, sweetest Lord and Father of my soul, to
turn back and go down the dark paths of my faults; but give me Your hand that I
may not turn from the path of following Your sweetest Son, Our Lord Christ, since
with the love You have for us, You were pleased to give Him to us as the ransom
and remedy for our souls. Grant that mine, united with His infinite merits, may reach
the dear harbor of Your eternal and loving company; nor may my enemies dare to
enter this inheritance, which You have guarded so carefully and taken from their
hands so many times. May the angelic spirits praise You, and give You thanks on
my behalf, my Lord and God! And may they give me memory and light, that I may
succeed in telling my entire life with the clarity that has been commanded of me and
that You have given me to know. May all be for Your glory and service, and my
annihilation and abasement. Amen.
Among the great mercies that Our Lord God has shown me, and indeed one of
the very greatest, is to have made me the granddaughter and daughter of very Chris¬
tian parents. Although I was among the last of the daughters of the family, I do re¬
call that all four of my grandparents were gachupines from Spam, and that they took
part in the conquest of these lands, the kingdom of the Indies. I never knew them.
My father’s name was Luis de Palacios y Solozano, and my mother was Antonia
Berruecos. Both were very rich in worldly goods, though as time passed their for¬
tunes diminished, as is the way with all earthly things in life. My mother was born
and raised in the city of Puebla de los Angeles, where her parents lived all their lives.
And as her parents were very rich (for they had a great fortune, even more than my
father, though he too was rich), a large portion fell to her.
 Maria de San Jose 185

My mother was married at the age of fifteen. When the wedding and festivities
of those days were finished, my father took her to one of the two farming haciendas
that he owned in the valley of Tepeaca. God had endowed her with lovely gifts, besides
her very pleasing appearance. Although she was just a girl, her dresses were those of
a woman of many years, so that it could be seen that she had great virtue, and that
persons without it should not speak to her, nor would she permit conversations that
were not of that kind; and in all things she showed her great understanding. She was
very devoted to Our Lady and fond of taking the Holy Sacraments very often. For
the rest of her life, she went through many great trials and illnesses. She bore it all
with the greatest patience; for patience was the virtue in which she shone the bright¬
est. For all of us she stood as a great example and edification. From the day my fa¬
ther brought her to the hacienda, when as I said she was just fifteen years old, he
never again took her from the house.
The hacienda had very good buildings and a nicely adorned chapel. They had a
license so that Mass could be said in it. The first daughter my mother had, as soon
as she was born, my father sent word to the lord Bishop of Puebla at that time, ask¬
ing license that the child might be baptized in his chapel. The Bishop granted it right
away, and she was baptized to my father’s great delight. And so it went with all the
children born to my mother, for we were eleven in all; two of her children died as
babies. She was left with eight daughters and one son, which makes nine. They were
named Tomas, who was the oldest, Agustina, Ana, Leonor, Francisca, Marfa, Juana—
that was I, for when I entered the convent I changed my name from Juana to Marfa.
After me, my mother had two more girls, Isabel and Catalina. All were baptized in
the chapel of the hacienda.
All of the daughters grew up without any of us being confirmed until God took
my father. Some time after my father had died, it happened that a Bishop passed through
that valley on the way to his diocese. He made a stop in the town of Tepeaca, where he
made confirmations. My mother, wanting us to be confirmed, set out on the road and
took all her daughters to the town, which was near the hacienda. There we were all
confirmed, thanks be to God, except for Tomas who already was. And as far as I re¬
call, I was already more than twelve years old. We confessed and received Communion
that same day, as we were now able to receive that most Blessed Sacrament.
By the mercy of Our Lord God, all the girls resembled their parents in being
virtuous, except for me; for I turned out quite different from them, although I had
greater obligation to be so, and the inclinations the Lord had given me were good. I
lost them all, letting myself be carried away by my passions, which grew pitiably with
age. Blessed be God, Who waited so long for me.
My mother raised her eight daughters and one son with great internal quiet,
and my father helped her teach them to be good Christians, as I have said. Both were
fond of virtue and of good books, which they made them read. God had given my
mother great skill in doing clever and neat handiwork and everything that a mother
should know in order to teach her children. She taught us all to read and, in short,
no schoolmaster or mistress was needed to teach us anything, save for my brother
Tomas who, when he came of age, was sent by my father to the city of Puebla to live
l86 APPENDIX C

with one of my father’s relatives so that he could study. My father kept Tomas at
his studies until he was a grown man. When he saw that Tomas had no inclination
to enter the religious life or any other profession, my father brought his son home to
help him with the hacienda.
And this was ordained from on high, for God saw fit to take my father, and he
left all his eight daughters with no position or support whatsoever, and my mother
burdened with the responsibilities of such a large family. My brother Tomas was
and is so good that he has been both father and protector to my mother and to all of
us; for he has given us all some position and support. And besides all this, he has
kept the two haciendas going that my father left him at his death—may the Lord
reward my brother in the same measure as Tomas has trusted in His great mercy.
My father died a most Christian death on Saturday, the Feast of the Nativity of Our
Lady, 1667. My mother was left with much sorrow and loneliness, though in great
conformity to the will of Our Lord God. When my father died, I was at the end of
my tenth year, just turning eleven. . . . [Maria goes on and talks of her father]
I was born on the feast of Samt Mark the Evangelist, the twenty-fifth of April,
1654, and because my godfather’s name was Juan, they called me Juana. And when I
took the veil, they called me Juana de San Diego. Then, when it came time for the
profession of vows, I asked them to change my name from Juana de San Diego to
Marfa de San Jose; for so great was my longing and desire to strip myself entirely of
all the things of this world, that it seemed better to leave behind even the name that
was mine and take another, as I did.
Right after my birth my mother said that she wished to nurse me herself, with¬
out help from any other woman such as she had with all the other daughters she
raised. And she did as she said; for I never took a drop of milk from any woman
other than my mother. I remember quite well that when I had reached the age of
five, my mother still nursed me at her breast. She did all this to avoid yet another
childbirth. As soon as I was born, she began to entreat the Lord not to give her an¬
other child, because she was quite worn out with all the ones she already had. But the
Lord, Who knows full well what is best for us, did not grant her this. And to test
her patience, when I was five, He gave her two more births. As soon as she knew that
she was pregnant, she felt grief and pain, though she always conformed to the will of
God. Right away she turned from me and sent me away from her side to be cared for
by my older sisters and especially by a maid who had been raised in the house and
was a girl of great virtue.
As I recall from that time when I was five years old, I already knew the four
prayers, which my mother had taught me, and she had set me to learn to read in
Christian doctrine; for she took more pains with my upbringing than with any of
her other daughters. It seems to me I can say in all truth that even before I could
speak at all clearly, the Lord gave me an indifference to all earthly things of this life,
and I was well known for feeling uneasy in any state but solitude, with nothing that
I could call my own. Only here could I find repose.
As soon as I was left without my mother’s care, I began to lose all the good I
had received from the upbringing she gave me. Heavens bless me, what could I
 Maria de San Jose 187

not find to say in these pages to the parents of children! How important it is to
keep them always in your sight and not let them go with bad companions! The
family at home was very large, for there were many servants, and so there were
girls to play with and make mischief; for they were all very close to my own age,
but none of them did me the harm that was done to me by an orphan girl, who
was raised by a lady that was our neighbor in those parts, and who most days came
to our house with the others to make mischief. As I have said, I had then turned
five years of age. This neighbor girl was older than I; she must have been about
seven. My sisters had learned common sense because they were bigger. The two
who came after me were still so little they were not old enough for anything. In
this group of girls I began to lose all my good inclinations and let them go to waste,
for I learned to curse and swear and use some words that were not very decent. In
our games and pranks, which were all the kind played by young girls with no ca¬
pacity for reason or understanding, I lost all that I had and let myself be carried
away by my passions, which increased as I grew older. Sad to say, I reached ten
years of age and was so absorbed and distracted by these games and pranks—which,
as I say, went no further than that; but it was all time wasted and very poorly spent.
And I had tied God’s hands, so that He could not favor me and give me light and
the use of reason to recognize it, and to recognize the wretched life that I had chosen
to my utter ruin and perdition. . . . [Maria describes the games she played with neighboring
girls and her vanity]
One afternoon I left my mother’s sitting room and went out to the patio, where
I set about grinding flour. There I was joined by other girls my age, for we usually
amused ourselves, most afternoons, by grinding flour. I was the one doing the grind¬
ing. We were all leaning against the wall that surrounded the patio. One of the girls
near me did some sort of a bad turn. As I was a girl of bad habits, I cursed her, and
before the word was out of my mouth, God permitted a lightning bolt to strike. And
although it appeared to be only an ordinary bolt of lightning, for me it was nothing
less than a bolt of light that the Lord Himself aimed at my very heart. The lightning
struck in the midst of those of us gathered there, and although it threw all of us to
the ground, it did no one any harm. But it broke through the corner of the wall, and
through the opening it made, it leapt out and killed an animal that was standing in
the field near the same wall.
May God bless my soul, how clearly and plainly did His Majesty show me that
as He took the life of that animal, He could with much greater cause have taken my
own! For I served Him in no other way than to offend Him and to bury myself in
the abyss of hell. May His vast goodness and mercy be given infinite thanks, for
working such good with such a one as I, who deserve to be cast into a thousand hells
for my great sins and evils.
Once we had recovered from this terror and fright, which were dreadful, we
arose from where we had fallen all stunned and bewildered by the lightning. With¬
out tending to any of the girls or speaking a word, I walked back towards the parlor
where my mother and sisters were. And as I passed the staircase, I encountered the
devil, who was seated on the bottom step in human form, like a naked mulatto. He
l88 APPENDIX C

was gnawing at one of his hands. Just as I saw him, he raised a finger as if to threaten
me, and he said to me: “You are mine. You will not escape my clutches. I saw this
more with my soul’s interior vision than with the eyes of my body. The words he
said to me sounded in my ears; I heard them spoken. But, comforted and aicjed by
He Who can do everything, Who is God, I managed to enter the sitting room where
my mother was.
This second fright was no less than that caused by the bolt of lightning. I con¬
cealed what had happened to me, saying not a word to my mother or to a single soul
of how I had seen the enemy in such a dreadful form, nor of the words he had spo¬
ken to me, once I recovered and returned to my senses. I found myself so altered
that even I did not know myself. I was no longer what I had been. For it was as though
a great window had opened in my soul, and through it came a very bright light, by
which I could see and understand with great clarity and light all that the Lord had
done and suffered and undertaken to ransom me at the expense of His most pre¬
cious blood. And at the same time I became aware of all that I had said and done in
the course of eleven years, which was then my age; I am not sure whether I had en¬
tered my twelfth year when this happened to me. I clearly saw and understood the
many and grave faults into which I had fallen, giving offense to His Divine Majesty
with my rude ingratitude. I felt great sorrow for having offended my God and Lord,
Who was favoring me with such a liberal hand. I was all sighs and tears, as I begged
the Lord that He might furnish me with a Confessor to whom I could confess all
my sins; for each one I held up to view was a spear that ran through my heart and my
soul, and all of them together were the very sharpest sword-points that pierced my
heart and soul and set them to rout. For I longed rather to have lost my life a thou¬
sand and one times, than to have displeased His Divine Majesty in even the slightest
way.
I spent all that night doubting and plotting out what mode of life I might choose
to repudiate and cast from me all the things of this world. Being in the condition I
was in, I rose terribly upset the next day, with no hope of finding any means or rem¬
edy for my longing to make confession—while each moment and instant seemed
centuries to me—nor of finding any means or resolution as to what way of life I
should lead. As soon as I saw that my mother’s bedroom was empty, with no one in
it—for by now I was fleeing everyone so that they would not see me in the condi¬
tion I was in—on the morning of that same day, I went into the bedroom and shut
the door, staying there alone to unburden myself and give free rein to my sobs and
tears and sighs, praying for mercy from Divine Wisdom, Who knew well how I had
offended Him.
I was walking about the room as I did this; and when I grew tired of walking, I
sat down on a footstool that was there next to my mother’s bed. And on the head of
the bed was an image of Our Lady. This was an image holding the Baby Jesus in her
arms. While I was there as I said, sitting on the footstool, with my chin in my hand
and deep in thought, unable to resolve anything, I heard this Lady of whom I have
been speaking tell me: “Juana, come to me.” (I have already said that my name was
Juana, and in religious life Marfa.) As soon as I heard these words, it seemed I was
restored from death to life, recovering my strength and receiving great consolation
 Maria de San Jose 189

m my soul. I rose with all haste and got down on my knees, with my hands clasped
in front of this image of Our Lady, and turned into a sea of tears; for as I have under¬
stood and experienced since that day, the Lord granted me the favor of the gift of
tears. . . . [Maria describes her vision of the Virgin Mary~\
Here the Most Blessed Virgin continued, and she told me: “My daughter, you
have given your consent to be the bride of my Most Blessed Son. Now you must
take vows, just as the nuns do who renounce the world and all its effects, entering
into the religious life and enclosure." I answered and said, “My Lady and Mother, I
do not know what vows these are or what religious life is like. You know my great
ignorance and small understanding, and how I was born and raised here in the coun¬
tryside without ever seeing nor speaking with a single person save my parents and
our household. I do not even know how to read. What do I know that could give me
any light as to what you tell me I must do?” Here the Most Blessed Lady answered
me, and she said: “My daughter, do not be troubled by what you do not know. Draw
near to me, and I shall teach you what you must do. Place your hands upon mine.”
I did as she said, and this Lady set about telling me just how and in what way I
must take them, each vow in its turn. I did nothing but follow along pronouncing
the same words the Virgin was telling me—that I should say them as soon as she
had finished making the four vows, in the same way and form that they are taken in
religious life by the nuns when they profess. I found myself, without knowing how
it could possibly be, with the ring placed on one finger of my hand, the same ring I
had seen before that the Child had on a tiny finger of His little hand. I have already
said that this was the Baby Jesus this image of Our Lady was holding in her arms. I
felt great wonder and confusion to find myself wearing the ring.
Here the Most Blessed Virgin went on speaking to me, and she said: “My daugh¬
ter, I have now fulfilled the promise I made you, that my Most Blessed Son would
give you His ring, as a token of His love. Now, I want to explain and show you how
you must fulfill and observe the vows you have made. The first you made was obe¬
dience to the Lord God Most High, and in His place and name, to your superiors
and prelates. And for as long as you live in your mother’s company, you must obey
her in all that she may order and command you to do, save when it might be any¬
thing that you know to be against the commandments and precepts of Our Lord
God. In such a case, you should not obey her. With regard to poverty, you should
have no private thing you call your own, in even the smallest amount; rather, leave all
to the Lord’s providence, and take care only to love Him and serve Him, giving over
to Him a heart disengaged and unattached to any earthly things of this mortal life.
For I assure you, daughter, that if you truly give yourself over and leave yourself to
His providence, He will not fall short or fail to help you in all your needs with His
accustomed mercy. With regard to chastity, you must guard not only that of the
body, but of the heart, living on this earth like an angel of the Lord. With regard to
enclosure, you must live and keep to your retreat in solitude, speaking only with God,
withdrawn from all things of this world, without speaking or communicating with a
single person who is not someone you know. All must be to set you on your way and
guide you entirely toward God, and always subject to your mother; you may do all
this without displeasing His Divine Majesty. Your clothing and dress must be en-
190 APPENDIX C

tirely of wool, and your life just like a nun’s, very strict and proper. I shall be a help
to you so that you may fulfill everything that you have promised His Majesty and
me in these four vows.”
With these words, the Most Blessed Virgin finished and brought to an end
everything that I have told here. At once, everything disappeared. I have never seen
the ring again. The image of Our Lady, which as I have said had the Child in her
arms, went back to the way it was before. I stayed kneeling just where I had been
while all this was happening, as I have told it here. My eyes were fountains of tears.
I did not know how to thank His Divine Majesty for the great deeds He had worked
in my wretchedness and misery. I found myself so changed that even I did not know
myself, nor was I what I had been before.
O my Lord and God! Of the mercies You have shown me, oh what a great con¬
version this was! I cannot perform my duty, Lord and Father of my soul, by being
anything less than holy and rendering You great service and working great things
for Your love, to give thanks and return in some part the great gifts I have received
in this conversion of mine. When I was most removed and forgetful of You, Your
merciful heart was moved to halt my unruly steps toward my perdition. I offer infi¬
nite thanks to You for what You have worked in me, an unworthy sinner.
Appendix D

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Selections from

La Respuesta a Sor Filotea

From The Answer /La Respuesta, ed. and trans., Electa Arenal and Amanda
Powell (New York: Feminist Press, 1994), pp. 39—53, 61—63.

It has not been my will, but my scant health and a rightful fear that have delayed my
reply for so many days. Is it to be wondered that, at the very first step, I should meet
with two obstacles that sent my dull pen stumbling? The first (and to me the most
insuperable) is the question of how to respond to your immensely learned, prudent,
devout, and loving letter. For when I consider how the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas
Aquinas, on being asked of his silence before his teacher Albertist Magnus, responded
that he kept quiet because he could say nothing worthy of Albertist, then how much
more fitting it is that I should keep quiet—not like the Saint from modesty, but
rather because, in truth, I am unable to say anything worthy of you. The second
obstacle is the question of how to render my thanks for the favor, as excessive as it
was unexpected, of giving my drafts and scratches to the press: a favor so far beyond
all measure as to surpass the most ambitious hopes or the most fantastic desires, so
that as a rational being I simply could not house it in my thoughts. In short, this was
a favor of such magnitude that it cannot be bounded by the confines of speech and
indeed exceeds all powers of gratitude, as much because it was so large as because it
was so unexpected. In the words of Quintilian: “They produce less glory through
hopes, more glory through benefits conferred.” And so much so, that the recipient is
struck dumb.
When the mother of [John] the Baptist—felicitously barren, so as to become
miraculously fertile—saw under her roof so exceedingly great a guest as the Mother
of the Word, her powers of mind were dulled and her speech was halted; and thus,
instead of thanks, she burst out with doubts and questions: “And whence is this to
me . . . ?” The same occurred with Saul when he was chosen and anointed King of
Israel: “Am not I a son of Jemini of the least tribe of Israel, and my kindred the last
among all the families of the tribe of Benjamin? Why then hast thou spoken this
word to me?” Just so, I too must say: Whence, O venerable Lady, whence comes
such a favor to me? By chance, am I something more than a poor nun, the slightest
creature on earth and the least worthy of drawing your attention? Well, why then
hast thou spoken this word to me? And whence is this to me?
I can answer nothing more to the first obstacle than that I am entirely unwor¬
thy of your gaze. To the second, I can offer nothing more than amazement, instead
of thanks, declaring that I am unable to thank you for the slightest part of what I
192 APPENDIX D

owe you. It is not false humility, my Lady, but the candid truth of my very soul, to say
that when the printed letter reached my hands—that letter you were pleased to dub
“Worthy of Athena”—I burst into tears (a thing that does not come easily to me),
tears of confusion. For it seemed to me that your great favor was nothing other than
God’s reproof aimed at my failure to return His favors, and while He corrects others
with punishments, He wished to chide me through benefits. A special favor, this, for
which I acknowledge myself His debtor, as I am indebted for infinitely many favors
given by His immense goodness; but this is also a special way of shaming and con¬
founding me. For it is the choicest form of punishment to cause me to serve, know¬
ingly, as the judge who condemns and sentences my own ingratitude. And so when
I consider this fully, here in solitude, it is my custom to say: Blessed are you my Lord
God, for not only did you forbear to give another creature the power to judge me,
nor have you placed that power in my hands. Rather you have kept that power for
yourself and have freed me of myself and of the sentence I would pass on myself,
which, forced by my own conscience, could be no less than condemnation. Instead
you have reserved that sentence for your great mercy to declare, because you love me
more than I can love myself.
My Lady, forgive the digression wrested from me by the power of truth; yet if
I must make a full confession of it, this digression is at the same time a way of seek¬
ing evasions so as to flee the difficulty of making my answer. And therefore I had
nearly resolved to leave the matter in silence; yet although silence explains much by
the emphasis of leaving all unexplained, because it is a negative thing, one must name
the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood. Failing that, silence will say
nothing, for that is its proper function: to say nothing. The holy Chosen Vessel was
carried off to the third Heaven and, having seen the arcane secrets of God, he says:
“That he was caught up into paradise, and heard secret words, which it is not granted
to man to utter.” He does not say what he saw, but he says that he cannot say it. In
this way, of those things that cannot be spoken, it must be said that they cannot be
spoken, so that it may be known that silence is kept not for lack of things to say, but
because the many things there are to say cannot be contained in mere words. St. John
says that if he were to write all of the wonders wrought by Our Redeemer, the whole
world could not contain all the books. Vieira says of this passage that in this one
phrase the Evangelist says more than in all his other writings; and indeed how well
the Lusitanian Phoenix speaks (but when is he not well-spoken, even when he speaks
ill?), for herein St. John says all that he failed to say and expresses all that he failed
to express. And so I, my Lady, shall answer only that I know not how to answer; I
shall thank you only by saying that I know not how to give thanks; and I shall go say,
by way of the brief label placed on what I leave to silence, that only with the confi¬
dence of one so favored and with the advantages granted one so honored, do I dare
speak to your magnificence. If this be folly, please forgive it; for folly sparkles in
good fortune’s crown, and through it I shall supply further occasion for your good¬
will, and you shall better arrange the expression of my gratitude.
Moses, because he was a stutterer, thought himself unworthy to speak to Pha¬
raoh. Yet later, finding himself greatly favored by God, he was so imbued with cour¬
age that not only did he speak to God Himself, but he dared to ask of Him the
 Sor Juana Inis de la Cruz 193

impossible: ‘Shew me thy face.” And so it is with me, my Lady, for in view of the
favor you show me, the obstacles I described at the outset no longer seem entirely
insuperable. For one who had the letter printed, unbeknownst to me, who titled it
and underwrote its cost, and who thus honored it (unworthy as it was of all this, on
its own account and on account of its author), what will such a one not do? What
not forgive? Or what fail to do or fail to forgive? Thus, sheltered by the assumption
that I speak with the safe-conduct granted by your favors and with the warrant be¬
stowed by your goodwill, and by the fact that, like a second Ahasuerus, you have
allowed me to kiss the top of the golden scepter of your affection as a sign that you
grant me kind license to speak and to plead my case in your venerable presence, I
declare that I receive in my very soul your most holy admonition to apply my study
to Holy Scripture; for although it arrives in the guise of counsel, it shall have for me
the weight of law. And I take no small consolation from the fact that it seems my
obedience, as if at your direction, anticipated your pastoral insinuation, as may be
inferred from the subject matter and arguments of that very Letter. I recognize full
well that your most prudent warning touches not on the letter, but on the many
writings of mine on humane matters that you have seen. And thus, all that I have
said can do no more than offer that letter to you in recompense for the failure to
apply myself which you must have inferred (and reasonably so) from my other writ¬
ings. And to speak more specifically, I confess, with all the candor due to you and
with the truth and frankness that are always at once natural and customary for me,
that my having written little on sacred matters has sprung from no dislike, nor from
lack of application, but rather from a surfeit of awe and reverence toward those sa¬
cred letters, which I know myself to be so incapable of understanding and which I
am so unworthy of handling. For there always resounds in my ears the Lord’s warn¬
ing and prohibition to sinners like me, bringing with it no small terror: “Why dost
thou declare my justices, and take my covenant in thy mouth?” With this question
comes the reflection that even learned men were forbidden to read the Song of Songs,
and indeed Genesis, before they reached the age of thirty: the latter text because of
its difficulty, and the former so that with the sweetness of those epithalamiums,
imprudent youth might not be stirred to carnal feelings. My great father St. Jerome
confirms this, ordering the Song of Songs to be the last text studied, for the same
reason: “Then at last she may safely read the Song of Songs: if she were to read it at
the beginning, she might be harmed by not perceiving that it was the song of a spiri¬
tual bridal expressed in fleshly language.” And Seneca says, “In early years, faith is
not yet manifest.” Then how should I dare take these up in my unworthy hands,
when sex, and age, and above all our customs oppose it? And thus I confess that often
this very fear has snatched the pen from my hand and have made the subject matter
retreat back toward that intellect from which it wished to flow; an impediment I did
not stumble across with profane subjects, for a heresy against art is not punished by
the Holy Office but rather by wits with their laughter and critics with their censure.
And this, “just or unjust, is not to be feared,” for one is still permitted to take Com¬
munion and hear Mass, so that it troubles me little if at all. For in such matters,
according to the judgment of the very ones who slander me, I have no obligation to
know how nor the skill to hit the mark, and thus if I miss it is neither sin nor dis-
194 APPENDIX D

credit. No sin, because I had no obligation; no discredit, because I had no possibility

of hitting the mark, and "no one is obliged to do the impossible.’ And truth to tell,
I have never written save when pressed and forced and solely to give pleasure to oth¬
ers, not only without taking satisfaction but with downright aversion, because I have
never judged myself to possess the rich trove of learning and wit that is perforce the
obligation of one who writes. This, then, is my usual reply to those who urge me to
write, and the more so in the case of a sacred subject: What understanding do I possess,
what studies, what subject matter, or what instruction, save four profundities of a
superficial scholar? They can leave such things to those who understand them; as for
me, I want no trouble with the Holy Office, for I am but ignorant and tremble lest
I utter some ill-sounding proposition or twist the true meaning of some passage. I
do not study in order to write, nor far less in order to teach (which would be bound¬
less arrogance in me), but simply to see whether by studying I may become less igno¬
rant. This is my answer, and these are my feelings.
My writing has never proceeded from any dictate of my own, but a force be¬
yond me; I can in truth say, “You have compelled me.” One thing, however, is true,
so that I shall not deny it (first because it is already well known to all, and second
because God has shown me His favor in giving me the greatest possible love of truth,
even when it might count against me). For ever since the light of reason first dawned
in me, my inclination to letters was marked by such passion and vehemence that neither
the reprimands of others (for I have received many) nor reflections of my own (there
have been more than a few) have sufficed to make me abandon my pursuit of this
native impulse that God Himself bestowed on me. His Majesty knows why and to
what end He did so, and He knows that I have prayed that He snuff out the fight of
my intellect, leaving only enough to keep His Law. For more than that is too much,
some would say, in a woman; and there are even those who say that it is harmful. His
Majesty knows too that, not achieving this, I have attempted to entomb my intellect
together with my name and to sacrifice it to the One who gave it to me; and that no
other motive brought me to the life of Religion, despite the fact that the exercises
and companionship of a community were quite opposed to the tranquillity and free¬
dom from disturbance required by my studious bent. And once in the community,
the Lord knows—and in this world only he who needs must know it, does—what I
did to try to conceal my name and renown from the public; he did not, however,
allow me to do this, telling me it was temptation, and so it would have been. If I
could repay any part of my debt to you, my Lady, I believe I might do so merely by
informing you of this, for these words have never left my mouth save to that one to
whom they must be said. But having thrown wide the doors of my heart and revealed
to you what is there under seal of secrecy, I want you to know that this confidence
does not gainsay the respect I owe to your venerable person and excessive favors.
To go on with the narration of this inclination of mine, of which I wish to give
you a full account: I declare I was not yet three years old when my mother sent off
one of my sisters, older than I, to learn to read in one of those girls’ schools that they
call Amigas. Affection and mischief carried me after her; and when I saw that they
were giving her lessons, I so caught fire with the desire to learn that, deceiving the
teacher (or so I thought), I told her that my mother wanted her to teach me also. She
 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 195

did not believe this, for it was not to be believed; but to humor my whim she gave
me lessons. I continued to go and she continued to teach me, though no longer in
make-believe, for the experience undeceived her. I learned to read in such a short
time that I already knew how by the time my mother heard of it. My teacher had
kept it from my mother to give delight with a thing all done and to receive a prize
for a thing done well. And I had kept still, thinking I would be whipped for having
done this without permission. The woman who taught me (may God keep her) is
still living, and she can vouch for what I say.
I remember that in those days, though I was as greedy for treats as children usually
are at that age, I would abstain from eating cheese, because I heard tell that it made
people stupid, and the desire to learn was stronger for me than the desire to eat—
powerful as this is in children. Later, when I was six or seven years old and already
knew how to read and write, along with all the other skills like embroidery and sew¬
ing that women learn, I heard that in Mexico City there were a University and Schools
where they studied the sciences. As soon as I heard this I began to slay my poor mother
with insistent and annoying pleas, begging her to dress me in men’s clothes and send
me to the capital, to the home of some relatives she had there, so that I could enter
the University and study. She refused, and was right in doing so; but I quenched my
desire by reading a great variety of books that belonged to my grandfather, and nei¬
ther punishments nor scoldings could prevent me. And so when I did go to Mexico
City, people marveled not so much at my intelligence as at my memory and the facts
I knew at an age when it seemed I had scarcely had time to learn to speak.
I began to study Latin, in which I believe I took fewer than twenty lessons. And
my interest was so intense, that although in women (and especially in the very bloom
of youth) the natural adornment of the hair is so esteemed, I would cut off four to
six fingerlengths of my hair, measuring how long it had been before. And I made
myself a rule that if by the time it had grown back to the same length I did not know
such and such a thing that I intended to study, then I would cut my hair off again to
punish my dull-wittedness. And so my hair grew, but I did not yet know what I had
resolved to learn, for it grew quickly and I learned slowly. Then I cut my hair right
off to punish my dull-wittedness, for I did not think it reasonable that hair should
cover a head that was so bare of facts—the more desirable adornment. I took the
veil because, although I knew I would find in religious life many things that would
be quite opposed to my character (I speak of accessory rather than essential mat¬
ters), it would, given my absolute unwillingness to enter into marriage, be the least
unfitting and the most decent state I could choose, with regard to the assurance I
desired of my salvation. For before this first concern (which is, at the last, the most
important), all the impertinent little follies of my character gave way and bowed to
the yoke. These were wanting to live alone and not wanting to have either obliga¬
tions that would disturb my freedom to study or the noise of a community that would
interrupt the tranquil silence of my books. These things made me waver somewhat
in my decision until, being enlightened by learned people as to my temptation, I
vanquished it with divine favor and took the state I so unworthily hold. I thought I
was fleeing myself, but—woe is me!—I brought myself with me, and brought my
greatest enemy in my inclination to study, which I know not whether to take as a
196 APPENDIX D

Heaven-sent favor or as a punishment. For when snuffed out or hindered with every
[spiritual] exercise known to Religion, it exploded like gun powder; and in my case
the saying “privation gives rise to appetite” was proven true.
I went back (no, I spoke incorrectly, for I never stopped)—I went on, I mean,
with my studious task (which to me was peace and rest in every moment left over
when my duties were done) of reading and still more reading, study and still more
study, with no teacher besides my books themselves. What a hardship it is to learn
from those lifeless letters, deprived of the sound of a teacher’s voice and explana¬
tions; yet I suffered all these trials most gladly for the love of learning. Oh, if only
this had been done for the love of God, as was rightful, think what I should have
merited! Nevertheless I did my best to elevate these studies and direct them to His
service, for the goal to which I aspired was the study of Theology. Being a Catholic,
I thought it an abject failing not to know everything that can in this life be achieved,
through earthly methods, concerning the divine mysteries. And being a nun and not
a laywoman, I thought I should, because I was in religious life, profess the study of
letters—the more so as the daughter of such as St. Jerome and St. Paula: for it would
be a degeneracy for an idiot daughter to proceed from such learned parents. I argued
in this way to myself, and I thought my own argument quite reasonable. However,
the fact may have been (and this seems most likely) that I was merely flattering and
encouraging my own inclination, by arguing that its own pleasure was an obligation.
I went on in this way, always directing each step of my studies, as I have said,
toward the summit of Holy Theology; but it seemed to me necessary to ascend by
the ladder of the humane arts and sciences in order to reach it; for who could fathom
the style of the Queen of Sciences without knowing that of her handmaidens? With¬
out Logic, how should I know the general and specific methods by which Holy Scrip¬
ture is written? Without Rhetoric, how should I understand its figures, tropes, and
locutions? Or how, without Physics or Natural Science, understand all the questions
that naturally arise concerning the varied natures of those animals offered in sacri¬
fice, in which a great many things already made manifest are symbolized, and many
more besides? How should I know whether Saul’s cure at the sound of David’s harp
was owing to a virtue and power that is natural in Music or owing, instead, to a super¬
natural power that God saw fit to bestow on David? How without Arithmetic might
one understand all those mysterious reckonings of years and days and months and
hours and weeks that are found in Daniel and elsewhere, which can be comprehended
only by knowing the natures, concordances, and properties of numbers? Without
Geometry, how could we take the measure of the Holy Ark of the Covenant or the
Holy City of Jerusalem, each of whose mysterious measurements forms a perfect cube
uniting their dimensions, and each displaying that most marvelous distribution of
the proportions of every part? ....
In this respect, I do confess that the trial I have undergone has been beyond all
telling; and thus I cannot confirm what I have, with envy, heard others say; that learning
has cost them no drudgery. How lucky they are! For me, it has not been knowledge
(for I still know nothing) but the desire to know that has cost me so dear that I
might truly say, like my good Father St. Jerome (though not with the benefit he offers):
“What efforts I spent on that task, what difficulties I had to face, how often I de-
 Sor Juana Ines ie, la Cruz 197

spaired, how often I gave up and then in my eagerness to learn began again, my own
knowledge can witness from personal experience and those can testify who were then
living with me. Save for the mention of companions and witnesses (for I have lacked
even this mitigation), I can in all truth affirm the rest of his words. And to think
that this, my wicked inclination, should be such, that it has vanquished all before it!
It has often befallen me—for among other favors I owe to God a nature that is
mild and affable; and the nuns, good creatures that they are, love me very much on
this account and take no note of my failings, and so they delight in my company.
Knowing this, and moved by the great love I bear them with more cause than theirs
for me, I take even greater delight in their company.—And so, as I say, in the times
they and I have not been occupied, I have often gone to offer them comfort and to
find recreation in their conversation. I began to notice that I was stealing this time
away from my studies, and I made a vow not to step into another nun’s cell unless I
were thus obliged by obedience or charity to do so; for unless I reined myself in this
harshly, love would burst the restraint exerted by my intent alone. Thus, knowing
my own weakness, I would hold to this vow for a month or a fortnight; and when it
was done, I gave myself a truce of a day or two before I renewed it. That day would
serve not so much to give me rest (for to desist from study has never been restful for
me), but so that I might not be thought gruff, withdrawn, and ungrateful in the face
of the undeserved affection of my most beloved sisters.
This shows all too well just how great is the strength of my inclination. May
God be praised that He inclined me to letters and not some other vice, which would
have been, in my case, nearly insurmountable. And from this, too, it may well be
inferred just how my poor studies have found their way (or, to be more exact, have
foundered) in steering against the current. For I have yet to tell the most strenuous
of my difficulties. Those accounted for to this point have been no more than hin¬
drances caused by my obligations or by chance, posed indirectly; they are not pur¬
poseful obstacles directly aimed at impeding and prohibiting my training. Who would
not think, upon hearing such widespread applause, that I had sailed before the wind
with a sea smooth as glass, upon the cheers of universal acclaim? Yet God Himself
knows it has not quite been so, because among the blossoms of that very acclaim
there have roused themselves and reared up the asps of rivalry and persecution, more
than I could possibly count. And the most venomous and hurtful to me have not
been those who with explicit hatred and ill-will have persecuted me, but those per¬
sons, loving me and desiring my good (and, therefore, greatly deserving before God
for their good intentions), who have mortified and tormented me more than any
others, with these words: “All this study is not fitting, for holy ignorance is your
duty, she shall go to perdition, she shall surely be cast down from such heights by
that same wit and cleverness.” How was I to bear up against this? A strange martyr¬
dom indeed, where I must be both martyr and my own executioner!
Well, as for this aptitude at composing verses—which is doubly unfortunate,
in my case, even should they be sacred verses—what unpleasantness have they not
caused me, and indeed do they not still cause? Truly, my Lady, at times I ponder
how it is that a person who achieves high significance—or rather, who is granted
significance by God, for He alone can do this—is received as the common enemy.
198 APPENDIX D

For that person seems to others to usurp the applause they deserve or to draw off
and dam up the admiration to which they had aspired, and so they persecute that
person.
That politically barbarous law of Athens remains in effect, whereby anyone
possessing significant qualities and virtues was expelled from the republic to prevent
his using them for the subjugation of public liberty; it is still observed in our own
times, though no longer for the same reason the Athenians held. But now there is
another motive, no less potent though less well founded, for it resembles a maxim of
that impious Machiavelli: to abhor the person who becomes significant because that
one tarnishes the fame of others.
What else but this could cause that furious hatred of the Pharisees against Christ,
when there were so many reasons to feel the opposite? . . .
Appendix E

Ursula Suarez: Selections from Relation autobiograjica

Translated by Nina M. Scott

As Your Paternity already knows, last Saturday—the eighth of this month and the day
of the Nativity—when I came to speak with you, and the following Wednesday, when
you brought me paper so that I should write, I was so wicked that I did not comply
punctually with your order, for which disobedience I implore you to pardon me and to
impose a penance so that by means of it I will mend my ways. My Father, I know not
what to put down with respect to what you want me to write about my young years,
because in my infancy and my youth I was extremely wicked. As Your Paternity will
see, I was the sum total of evil, for the light of reason had barely shone on me, when I
was swept away by bad inclinations, and if Divine Providence had not seen fit to keep
me in check with severe illnesses, my life would have been a disaster.
My mother used to say that she barely had a life [of her own] when she was
raising me on account of the travails occasioned by so many illnesses which I had. I
began to get sick when I was eleven months old, and my mother attributed it to the
fact that I had a wet nurse who was pregnant, and she lamented this calamity and
hired another wet nurse, and after her eight more, so that I had ten wet nurses: this
is the reason I have turned out so bad. Once well paid, all of them left me; my mother
said that she dressed them in serge and Castilina flannel, and on top of this advanced
them their salary, and then they would still depart. I was constantly more sickly, as
was my mother, with an abscessed breast, for this was the reason to be hiring [wet
nurses], as my first wet nurse, who was her slave, she suspected of being pregnant.
I will give an account to Your Paternity of my childhood as I was told it. . . .
As far as my birth is concerned, [my mother] said that I was born in my paternal
grandparents’ home: Secretary Martin Suares Madrigal and Doha Marfa del Campo
Lantadilla, who, along with my maternal grandfather, Don Antonio de las Cuevas y
Escobar, lifted me from the baptismal font with great rejoicing and gladness, for I
was the first daughter to whom my mother had given birth, as she had aborted an¬
other daughter at eight months, who did not receive the water of baptism, but God
made me; may He, the author of this favor, be praised and blessed, as for so long he
has shown me his mercies.
I knew nothing more about this [occasion], except that many of my relatives
came to my baptism, it being the provisor Gaspar Dfas who baptized me. My aunt
Doha Mariana de Escobar, who is still alive, told me that when I was about to be
born she pinned on a rose of Jericho [a plant believed to aid in childbirth]. I said to
her, “When I am big I will be the rose among thorns, for I will be a nun.’’

199
200 APPENDIX E

She said to me, “You, a nun? So wicked and of such bad blood, opponents of
becoming nuns.”
And I replied, “I, Aunt, will be the crown of my generation.”
Said she, “Quiet, imp, for your liveliness is not for the likes of a nun, though
when you were very little, one day I was giving you a bath in the middle of the patio
and you frightened me, for, holding you quite naked, [there you were] clutching my
braids and you began to ring them back and forth with great tempo, and imitated
the sound of the bells with your mouth. I, frightened, called your mother and said,
‘Kitty, come and see your daughter who’s going to be a nun, look how she peals.’ My
mother and all the other women came out to applaud your charm: I don’t know what
it was, because you are a great rascal.”
I told her, “Aunt, Your Grace will see that I will become a nun.”
Going back to my upbringing and the trouble my mother told me she had with
respect to this, she used to say, “Daughter of so many tears and prayers, why does
God protect you, whose life caused me so much anguish, for there is not a saint to
whom I have not appealed to make you whole, and you are so bad.” My mother
would tell me this when I was little and would have gotten into trouble, for I was an
extremely mischievous and lively child, the counterbalance being my eternally sickly
body, for not a day went by that it was not ill. My mother lugged me from convent
to convent, paying for novenas and masses and giving alms at the altar for my life,
for on three occasions she said, I had been [completely] emaciated, with such ter¬
rible fevers that I neither ate nor drank; she kept me alive by giving me drops of
milk, which I could not swallow. As it seemed that she could find no cure for my
illness in the city’s churches, she went out to Our Lady of Renca, that she should be
our intercessor, bringing her wax and silver; but as the Mother of God is not out for
profit, I came back in the same shape as I had been brought there. My mother, bathed
in tears because she had no other daughter and could see that I was dying, for I was
not even opening my eyes, went again the next day, sad and afflicted, and it is well
said that persistence carries the day: she went to St. Nicholas’s altar and flung me
upon it, and said to him: “Blessed saint, she is gone and you must raise her from the
dead; I will dress her in your blessed habit, and if she gets well, she will wear it for
two years.” She had a mass chanted for the saint, and asked that the last rites be
administered to me; with that I began to revive.
Appendix F

Catalina de Erauso: Selections from Vida i sucesos

From Madres del verbo/Mothers of the Word: Early Spanish American Women
Writers, ed. and trans. Nina M. Scott (Alburquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1999), pp. 35—49.

Chapter 1. Her homelandparents, birth, education, flight, and journeys

throughout various parts of Spain

I, Dona Catalina de Erauso, was born in the town of San Sebastian, in Guipuzcoa,
in the year 1585, the daughter of Captain Don Miguel de Erauso and of Dona Maria
Perez de Galarraga y Arce, natives and residents of that town. My parents brought
me up at home with my other siblings until I was four years old. In 1589 they put me
in the convent of San Sebastian el Antiguo, in said town, which belongs to Domini¬
can nuns, with my aunt Dona Ursula de Unza y Sarasti, my mother’s cousin and the
abbess of that convent; there I was raised until I was fifteen, when the matter of my
profession came up.
When I was almost at the end of my year of the novitiate, I had a quarrel with
a professed nun named Dona Catalina de Aliri who, being a widow, had professed
and entered the convent. She was strong and I but a girl; she slapped me, and I re¬
sented it. On the night of March 18, 1600, the eve of St. Joseph, the convent arose at
midnight for Matins. I went into the choir and found my aunt kneeling there; she
called me over, gave me the key to her cell, and told me to bring her prayer book. I
went to get it. I unlocked [the cell] and took it, and, seeing all the keys to the con¬
vent hanging from a nail, I left the cell open and gave my aunt her key and the prayer
book. The nuns were already in the choir and had solemnly begun Matins; at the
first lesson I went up to my aunt and asked her permission to withdraw, as I was
feeling ill. My aunt put her hand to my forehead and said, “Go lie down.” I left the
choir, took a lamp, and went to my aunt’s cell; there I took a pair of scissors, thread,
and a needle; I took some coins (reales de a ochoj that were lying there and took the
convent keys and left. I went along opening doors and shutting them behind me,
and at the final one left my scapulary and went out into the street, which I had never
seen, with no idea which way to turn or where to go. I don’t remember where I went,
but I came on a stand of chestnut trees that was outside [of town] but close behind
the convent. There I hid, and spent three days designing, fitting, and cutting out
clothes. I made myself a pair of breeches from a blue cloth petticoat I was wearing,
and from an underskirt of coarse green wool, a sleeved doublet and leggings; I left

201
202 APPENDIX F

the habit there because I didn’t know what to do with it. I cut off my hair, which I
threw away, and on the third night, since I wanted to get away from there, I left for
parts unknown, slogging over roads and skirting villages until I came to Vitoria, which
is about twenty leagues from San Sebastian, on foot, weary and without having eaten
anything but plants I found along the way.
I entered Vitoria with no idea where to stay. A few days later I met Dr. Don
Francisco de Cerralta, a professor there, who, without knowing me, took me in with
no difficulty and gave me some clothes. He was married to a cousin of my mother’s,
as I found out later, but I did not reveal who I was. I was with him for about three
months, during which time, as he saw that I read Latin well, he liked me more and
wanted to educate me, but when I refused he insisted and even laid hands on me.
When that happened I made up my mind to leave him, and did so. I took some of
his money, agreed to pay twelve reales to a muleteer who was leaving for Valladolid,
forty-five leagues away, and departed with the latter.
When I got to Valladolid, where the Court was at that time, I soon got a posi¬
tion as a page to Don Juan de Idiaquez, the king’s secretary, who clothed me well.
There I called myself Francisco Loyola, and was very comfortable for seven months.
At the end of that time, while I was standing in the doorway one evening with a
fellow page, my father arrived and asked us if Senor Don Juan was at home.
My comrade said he was. My father said to let him know that he was there, and
the page went upstairs while I stayed with my father; we said nothing to each other,
and he did not recognize me. The page came back and said that he should go up¬
stairs, so up he went and I behind him. Don Juan came out on the staircase and,
embracing him, said, “Senor Captain, what a welcome visit!” My father spoke in such
a way that the Senor knew he was annoyed, so Don Juan sent away another visitor,
then came back and they sat down. He asked what was the matter. My father told
how that girl of his had left the convent and the search for her had brought him to
that region. . . .
I, when I heard my father’s conversation and feelings, withdrew and went to my
room. I took my clothes and left, taking with me some eight doubloons which I
happened to have, and went to a tavern; I slept there that night, and heard a muleteer
say that he was leaving for Bilbao in the morning. I came to terms with him and we
left the next day; with no idea as to what to do or where to go, I simply let myself be
borne by the wind like a feather. .. .
After I got out, I went to Estella, in Navarre, which I think is about twenty
leagues away. I reached Estella, where I became the page of Don Carlos de Arellano,
who belonged to the order of Santiago, in whose house and service I remained for
two years, well treated and well attired. Afterward, for no other reason than my fancy,
I left that comfortable position and went to my native San Sebastian, where I, a well-
dressed dandy, spent some time without anyone recognizing me. One day I went to
mass at my convent, the same service my mother attended, and saw that she looked
at me without recognizing me; when mass was over, some nuns called me over to the
choir, but I pretended not to understand, paid them many compliments and left.
This was well into the year 1603.
 Catalina de Erauso 203

From there I went to . . . Sanlucar. There I found Captain Miguel de Echarreta,

another Basque, who commanded a tender to the galleons under General Don Luis
Fernandez de Cordoba, part of Don Luis Fajardo’s armada, which was sailing for
Punta de Araya. I signed on as a cabin boy in Captain Esteban Eguino’s galleon. He
was my uncle, my mother’s cousin, and today lives in San Sebastian. I went aboard,
and we left Sanlucar on Holy Monday in the year 1603.

Chapter 2. She leaves Sanlucar for Punta Araya, Cartagena, Nombre de Dios, and Panama

As I was new to the job, I had some difficulties on the voyage. Without knowing
who I was, my uncle was kind to me and thought very highly of me; when he heard
where I was from, and my parents’ fictitious name, I had in him a great protector.
When we got to Punta Araya, we came upon a small enemy force entrenched on the
shore, and our fleet drove it away. We finally reached Cartagena de las Indias, and
were there eight days.
I had my name taken off the list as cabin boy, and went into the service of the
said Captain Eguino, my uncle. From there we went to Nombre de Dios, where
we stayed for nine days; many of our men died, which made us leave there very

When the silver was already aboard and everything was ready for our return
voyage to Spain, I played a major trick on my uncle, making off with five hundred
of his pesos. At ten at night, when he was asleep, I went on deck and told the sentries
that the captain was sending me ashore on an errand. As they knew me, they let me
pass with no trouble and I jumped ashore, but they never saw me again. An hour
later they fired the departure gun and weighed anchor, ready to sail.
When the fleet had left, I took employment with Captain Juan de Ibarra, the
agent for the Panama treasury, who is still alive today. Four to six days later we left
for Panama, where he lived and where I stayed with him for about three months. He
did not treat me well, for he was miserly, and I had to spend all the money I had
lifted from my uncle until I had not a penny left; thereupon I departed in order to
look for better employment elsewhere.
When I looked around I found Juan de Urquiza there, a merchant from Trujillo,
and reached an agreement with him; things went well for me with him, and we were
in Panama three months.

Chapter 5. She leaves Trujillo for Lima

Having left Trujillo for Lima and having gone more than eighty leagues, I entered
the city of Lima, capital of the prosperous realm of Peru. . . .
I gave my letter to Diego de Solarte, a very wealthy merchant who is now chief
consul of Lima and to whom Juan de Urquiza had recommended me; he immedi¬
ately took me into his home with great courtesy and kindness, and a few days later
entrusted his shop to me, assigning me a salary of six hundred pesos a year, and there
I did my job much to his satisfaction and pleasure.
204 APPENDIX F

At the end of nine months he told me that it was time to make my living else¬
where, and the reason for this was that there were two young girls in his house, his
wife’s sisters, with whom I used to play and romp about, especially with one who
showed a decided liking for me. And one day, while I was in the drawing room with
my head in her lap and caressing her legs, while she was combing my hair, he hap¬
pened to look in through the grille and see us, and heard her say to me that I should
go to Potosi’ to get some money and we would be married. He withdrew, soon after
that summoned me, asked me to explain myself, discharged me, and I left.
I found myself unemployed and very out of favor. At that time six companies
of men were being assembled to go to Chile; I went to one of them and enlisted as
a soldier, for which I immediately received eighty pesos in wages. My employer Diego
de Lasarte, who found out about it, was very sorry, for it seemed that he had not
wanted it to come to this. He offered to intercede with the officers so that they would
take me off the muster roll and return the money I had been given, but I refused,
telling him that I had a taste for roving and seeing the world. Finally, having been
assigned to the company of Captain Gonzalo Rodriguez, whose camp-master was
Diego Bravo de Sarabia, I left Lima in a detachment of sixteen hundred men for the
city of Concepcion, which is five hundred forty leagues from Lima.

Chapter 6. She arrives in Concepcion, Chile, and finds her brother. She goes to Paicabi and,
while participating in the battle of Valdivia, captures a standard. She returns to Concepcion
and kills two men and her own brother.

It took us twenty days traveling time to get to the port of Concepcion. It’s a fair¬
sized city, with the title of noble and loyal, and has a bishop. Because of the scarcity
of people in Chile, we were well received. Soon an order came from the governor,
Alonso de Ribera, that we should disembark, and it was brought by his secretary,
Captain Miguel de Erauso. As soon as I heard his name I was delighted and saw that
he was my brother; even though I didn’t know him, nor had seen him—because he
left San Sebastian for these parts when I was two years old—I had had news of him,
but not of his whereabouts. He took the list of soldiers, read it off, and asked each
one his name and place of origin; when he got to me and heard my name and place
of birth, he threw down the pen, embraced me, and asked many questions about his
father and mother and siblings, and about his beloved Catalma, the nun. I answered
everything as best I could, without betraying my identity, nor he guessing it. He went
through the list, and when he finished he took me to his home for dinner and I sat
down to eat. He told me that the garrison at Paicabf to which I was assigned was a
terrible place for soldiers and that he would speak to the governor to have me trans¬
ferred. During the meal he went over to see the governor, taking me along. He re¬
ported on the recent arrivals, and asked as a favor that a young lad from his part of
the country be transferred to his company, for since his departure he had come across
no others from there. The governor had me come in, and when he saw me, I don’t
know for what reason, he said that he could not transfer me. My brother was upset
and left, but a short while later, the governor called my brother back again and told
him that things could be the way he wanted them.
 Catalina ie Erauso

And so, when the troops left, I stayed with my brother as his soldier, eating at
his table for almost three years without having him guess a thing. A few times I ac¬
companied him to his mistress s house; afterward I went a few other times without
him, and he found out and took offense and told me not to go back. He spied on
me, and caught me at it again; he waited for me when I came out, and whipped me
with a belt, injuring my hand. I was forced to defend myself. When he heard the
altercation Captain Francisco de Aillon showed up and made peace, but I had to slip
into [the church of] San Francisco because I feared the governor, [known to be] a
severe man, as he proved to be in this instance, although my brother interceded.
Ultimately he banished me to Paicabf; there was no recourse but to go, and I stayed
there for three years.

Chapter zo. She goes to Guamanga, and what happened to her there,
until she reveals her identity to the bishop

I got to Guamanga and went to an inn. ... I went to look at the city, and liked it, as
it had handsome buildings, the best I had seen in Peru. I found three monasteries
(Franciscan, Mercedarian, and Dominican), a convent and a hospital, many Indian
and Spanish residents, [and] a wonderful climate for settling this plain, neither hot
nor cold. There are great harvests of wheat, wine, fruits, and gram; a fine church
with three prebendaries, two canons, and a saintly bishop: an Augustinian friar [named]
Don Agustin de Carvajal, who people said had been there since 1612, and who was
my salvation, though he was taken from me by his sudden death in 1620.
I was there for a few days, and my ill luck would have it that I sometimes visited
a gaming house. One day when I was there, the magistrate, Don Baltasar de Quinones,
entered; he looked at me, and as he did not recognize me, asked me where I was
from. I said I was Basque. He said, “Where have you come from just now?” I an¬
swered, “Cuzco.” He hesitated a moment while observing me, and said, “You’re under
arrest.” I said, “Fine with me,” drew my sword and retreated toward the door. He
shouted for help in the king’s name, and I found the door so blocked that I was unable
to leave. I drew a three-barreled pistol, got away and disappeared, finding refuge in
the house of a friend I had made there. The magistrate thereupon seized my mule
and some other trifles I had left in the inn. I spent a few days hiding, having discov¬
ered that my friend was a Basque. Meanwhile there was no word of the matter, nor
did I feel that the authorities were doing anything about it, but it still seemed a good
idea to us for me to move to another place, for I had the same problem there as I did
everywhere.
Determined to do this, I left one day at nightfall and, my misfortune would
have it, immediately ran into two constables. They asked me, “Who goes there?” I
replied, “A friend.” They demanded my name, and I answered, “The devil,” which
I shouldn’t have said. They began to lay hands on me, and I took out my sword,
causing a great commotion. They cried out, “Help us in the name of the Law!” and
people gathered. The magistrate came out of the bishop’s house where he had been,
more constables came. I found myself in a desperate situation, fired my pistol, and
one went down. The brawl got bigger, and I found my Basque friend and some of
206 appendix f

his compatriots at my side. The magistrate shouted that I should be killed, and shots
were exchanged on both sides, until the Bishop came out with four torchbearers, and
stepped into the middle of the fray, directing his secretary Juan Bautista de Arteaga
my way. -x
This man stepped up to me and said, “Ensign, give me your weapons.”
I said, “Sir, there are many enemies here.”
He said “Hand them over, for you are safe with me, and I give you my word
that I will get you out of this, cost me what it may.”
I said, “Exalted Sir, when I get into the church I will kiss your illustrious feet.”
As I was saying this, four of the magistrate’s slaves fell upon me and put me
into a tight spot, pulling at me ferociously with no regard for His Lordship’s pres¬
ence, so that I had to defend myself and knock one of them down. The Bishop’s
secretary, with sword and shield, along with others of his retinue, came to my aid,
shouting loudly and denouncing the disrespect shown the Bishop, after which the
brawling abated somewhat. His Lordship seized my arm, took away my weapons,
and, placing me at his side, took me with him into his house. He had a slight wound
of mine dressed, and ordered some dinner brought to me; thereupon he told me to
go to bed, locked me in, and took the key with him. The magistrate subsequently
arrived, and, as I later heard, had a long conversation and high words with His Lord-
ship concerning this matter.
In the morning about ten, His Lordship summoned me into his presence and
asked me who I was and from where, who my parents were, and the whole course of
my life: the hows and the whys of how I came to be there. I embellished my tale
considerably, mixing in good advice, the perils of life, my fear of death and the con¬
sequences thereof, and how terrified I was lest the afterlife catch me unawares; I tried
to calm and humble myself and to kneel before God, which made me feel very small.
And when I saw what a saintly man he was, it seemed that I was already in the pres¬
ence of God, so I took off my hat and said to him: “Sir, all I have just told Your
Lordship is false. The truth is this: I am a woman, I was born in such-and-such a
place, the daughter of so-and-so, and at a certain age was placed in a certain convent
with my aunt so-and-so. There I grew up, put on the habit and was a novice. When
I was about to profess, for such-and-such a reason I left. I went to such-and-such a
place, took off my habit, put on other clothes, cut my hair, went hither and thither;
went aboard ship, put into port, went to and fro, killed, wounded, cheated, ran around,
and finally landed here, at the feet of Your Most Illustrious Lordship.”
During the time it took to tell this story, which took until one o’clock, the saintly
man was all ears: he listened to me without speaking or batting an eyelash, and when
I finished he said not a word, but wept bitterly. Afterward he sent me off to rest and
to eat something. He rang a bell, bid an old chaplain come, and sent me to his ora¬
tory where they put a table and a mattress for me, and locked me in, I lay down and
slept. In the afternoon about four, the Bishop called me to him again, and spoke to
me with great kindness of spirit, beseeching me to give thanks to God for the great
favor He had shown me by making me see the path of perdition, which leads one
straight to everlasting torment. He exhorted me to go back over my past and to make
a proper confession, for I had already come a long way, and it would be easy for me.
 Catalina de Erauso 207

After this God would lend His help so that we could figure out what to do next. In
these and other matters the afternoon drew to a close. I withdrew, was given a good
meal, and went to bed.
The next morning the Lord Bishop said Mass, which I attended, and afterward
he gave thanks. He withdrew to have breakfast, and took me with him. He expounded
on his sermon, and told me that mine was the most curious case of this sort he had
heard in his life, and finally said, “But is it really true?”
I said, “Yes, Sir.”
He replied, “Don’t be affronted if its peculiar nature strains the imagination.”
Sir,” I said, “it really is true and if Your Lordship wants to make sure by hav¬
ing me examined by some women, I am willing to do it.”
He said, “I’m glad to hear you say that, and I agree.”
I withdrew because it was his reception time. At noon I ate, then rested a bit,
and in the afternoon about four, two matrons came in, examined me, and were con¬
vinced; later they swore before the Bishop that they had examined me to a sufficient
degree to be sure and had found me as intact a virgin as the day I was born. His
Lordship was touched, dismissed the women and had me sent for; in the presence of
the chaplain, who had come with me, he stood up and tenderly embraced me, saying,
“My daughter, now I believe what you told with no doubts whatsoever, and will
henceforth believe anything you tell me. I respect you as one of the amazing people
of this world, and promise to help you in any way I can, to take care of your needs,
and to do that to serve God,”
He ordered me put in a suitable room, where I was comfortable and prepared
my confession, which I made as soon as possible, and afterward His Lordship gave
me communion. Apparently my story got around, and the number of people that
came was huge; we were unable to keep them out, as much as I minded it, and His
Lordship as well.
Finally, six days later, His Illustrious Lordship ordered me to go into the con¬
vent of the Poor Clares of Guamanga, as there was no other, and to put on the habit.
His Lordship left his house with me at his side, surrounded by such a mob of people
that I don’t think there was anyone in the city who didn’t come, and for that reason
it took a long to get there. We finally got to the porter’s lodge, because going to the
church, as His Lordship had initially intended, was out of the question for it was
completely full. The whole convent was there, bearing lit candles, and the abbess
and senior nuns signed a document in which the convent promised to hand me over
to the Bishop or a prelate who might succeed him, any time they gave the word. His
Lordship embraced and blessed me, and I went in [to the convent]. I was escorted in
procession to the choir, and prayed there. I kissed the lady abbess’s hand, was em¬
braced by and in turn embraced the other nuns; they then took me to a locutory
where His Lordship awaited me. There he gave me good advice, and exhorted me to
be a good Christian woman, to give thanks to Our Lord God and to make frequent
use of the sacraments; His Lordship offered to come and administer them person¬
ally, as he indeed did many times, and generously offered me anything at all I might
need. News of this event spread everywhere very quickly, and people who had seen
me before, and people, both before and after, who heard my story all over the Indies,
208 appendix f

were amazed. In 1620, within five months, my saintly bishop suddenly died, and I
felt his loss keenly. . . .

\_Catalina de Erauso goes to Lima and spends the next two years in a convent there, until word arrives
from Spain that she was never a professed nun, and can therefore leave the convent and take off her nun’s
habit. She goes to Spain and presents herself before King Philip IV, who grants her a Ife pension of 800
escudos; she sees him again in Barcelona, having been robbed along the way, and he gives her another gift
of money. She subsequently travels to Italy to see the pope.]

Chapter 25. She goes from Barcelona to Genoa and thence to Rome

... I left Genoa for Rome. I kissed the foot of His Holiness Urban VIII and told
him succinctly, and as best I could all about my life, adventures, gender, and virgin¬
ity. His Holiness appeared to be astonished thereby, and graciously gave me permis¬
sion to continue to lead my life dressed as a man, urging me to lead an honest life
from now on, and to refrain from offending my fellow man, reminding me of God’s
justice with reference to His commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” My case became
well known there, and I was constantly surrounded by a throng of illustrious per¬
sons: princes, bishops, and cardinals. Every door was open to me, so that in the month
and a half that I was in Rome, rarely a day went by that I was not invited and made
much of by princes. One Friday in particular, on specific request by the Roman Senate,
I was invited and entertained by some gentlemen who entered my name in a book as
a Roman citizen. On St. Peter’s Day, June 29,1626, I was taken to St. Peter’s chapel,
where I saw the cardinals and the usual ceremonies they hold on that day. All or
most of them were extremely courteous and kind, and many spoke to me. In the
afternoon, while three cardinals stood around me, one of them, Cardinal Magalon,
told me that I had no other flaw than being a Spaniard, to which I replied, “It seems
to me, Sir, keeping in mind the deference one owes your illustrious person, that it is
the only good thing I have.”
Notes

Introduction
1. One account states that of the 6,000 men of Spanish descent living in Lima, 2,500
had taken religious vows, and one in four women lived in the convent. See Galve, “Santa
Rosa de Lima,” 55, and Martin, Daughters of the Conquistadores, 176—180.
2. For a detailed study of these works, see Destefano, “Miracles and Monasticism,”
and Rubial, La santidad controvertida. Rivas, “Gran cosa es el buen ejemplo,” and Ragon,
“Libros de devocion,” also examine publications records of saintly biographies.
3. “Desde que la Sierva de Dios entro en esta Cuidad tuvo a pares las armas, las del
Emperador, que la ennoblecen, y las de Catharina, que la defienden; fue la Venerable
Sierva de Dios, las armas mas eftcaces de la Puebla pues tantas veces la defendio de los
enemigos” (Ramos, “Dedicatoria,” De los prodigios, Vol. 3).
4. “La Nueva Espana es una epoca en la que el arrobo de una monja, la milagrosa
curacion de un agonizante, el arrepentimiento de un penitenciado o los vaticinios de una
beata, son mas noticia que el alza en el precio de los oficios o la imposicion de una
alcabala; una epoca en que son de mas momento los viajes al interior del alma que las
expediciones a las Californias o a Filipinas.... El historiador que ignore esa jerarqufa en
los valores vitales de la e'poca, podra ofrecernos un relato documentado y exhaustivo, si se
quiere, de los sucesos que la llenan, pero no penetrara en la camara secreta de su acontecer
mas significativo” (quoted in dela Maza, Catharina de San Juan, introduction).
5. See Rivas’s study, “Gran cosa es el buen ejemplo.”
6. Santander y Torres, Vida de Maria de S. Joseph.
7. Ibid., unnumbered preliminary pages.
8. For more on the history of the Catholic saints, see Kieckhefer, “Imitators of
Christ.”
9. Teresa de Jesus, Libro de la vida, ch. 26.
10. For exceHent studies of the history of confession in the Catholic Church, see
Tambling, Confession; Tentler, Sin and Confession; and Zimmerman, “Confession and
Autobiography.”
11. For more on the new rules established, see Zimmerman, “Confession and
Autobiography,” 125—126, and Tentler, Sin and Confession, 99.
12. Zimmerman, in fact, studies the relationship between early modern autobiography
and Catholic confession in “Confession,” 124.
13. Slade, St. Teresa of Avila.
14. Greenspan, “Autohagiographical Tradition.”
15. Alberro, Inquiscion y sociedad, 168.
16. These are listed and described in “Nos los inquisidores,” Edict of the Mexican
Inquisition, 1621.
17. Burke, “Counter-Reformation Saint.”
18. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, nearly one in four saints were women,
and most were mystics. See Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, 220.
19. Lerner, Feminist Consciousness; McNamara, Sisters in Arms; Petroff, Visionary Literature;
Walker, Vida de Maria de S. Joseph.
20. Santander y Torres, “Prologo,” Vida de Maria de S. Joseph.

209
zio Notes to Pages lJ—zy

21. Montero, Sermon, zi.

22. “Cuando se quitaron muchos libros de romance, que no se leyesen, yo senti mucho,
porque algunos me daban recreacion leerlos, y yo no podia ya, por dejarlos en latin, me
dijo el Senor: ‘No tengas pena, que Yo te dare libro vivo”’ (Teresa de Jesus, Libro de landa,
ch. 26).
23. There are a few other well-known religious women, whom for reasons of space I
have excluded from this study: the Colombian mystic Madre Castillo; the mystic Mexican
author Maria Ana Agueda; America’s other female saint, Mariana de Quito; and Puebla’s
beloved nun Maria de Jesus. I mention these women in passing when they relate to the
women studied here.

Chapter 1
My thanks to Jodi Bilinkoff, Mary Giles, and Carla Pestana for their valuable suggestions
on this chapter, and to Frank Graziano who helped me locate key bibliographical items.
Translations were provided by Jodi Bilinkoff.
1. See Melendez, Festiva Pompa, zot— 3m For a twentieth-century narrative description
of the event, see Wuffarden and Perez, “Esplendor,” 29.
2. Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa, chaps. 27—29.
3. See Melendez (Festiva Pompa) for more information on the brotherhoods, 29r;
Mujica Pinilla describes the popularity of her portrait in “El ancla de Santa Rosa,” 156.
4. Getino, La patrona de America. Also of note are Vargas Urgarte’s Laflor de Lima, a
compendium of other biographies, and Angulo’s Santa Rosa, an extensive bibliography of
published sources.
5. While Graziano (“Una verdad ficticia”) focuses on the role and significance of her
“sacrificial body,” Galve’s “Santa Rosa de Lima,” and Iwasaki’s “Mujeres” argue that as a
mature colonial city, Lima needed both a saint (Rosa) and scapegoats (Rosa’s friends tried
for alumbradismo) to establish its Christian identity. For his part, Millones ( Una partecita) sees
Rosa as being transformed into a symbol for Andean populations. See also Martinez
Hampe, Santidad, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla.” Others, such as Brading (The First America,
369), suggest that Rosa’s popularity and success stemmed from people associating her with
the Virgen del Rosario, who had miraculously appeared during one of Pizarro’s battles.
6. See the commemorative work edited by Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo.
7. For more information, see the essay by Wuffarden and Pe'rez, “Esplendor.”
8. Mujica Pinilla, Santa Rosa, 54.
9. Toribio de Mogrovejo (1535—1606) and Francisco Solano (1549—1602) were beatified
in the 1670s and canonized in 1726. Two other Dominicans, Juan de Macias (1585—1645)
and Martin de Porres (1579—1639) were beatified in the nineteenth century. Martin de
Porres was canonized in 1962. Galve lists other aspirants and venerables; more than sixty
hagiographies were published during the period. (Galve, “Santa Rosa,” 62—63).
10. My portrait of Rosa is based on the two procesos, and the biographies by Gonzalez
de Acuna (Rosa mistica), Leonard Hansen (Vida admirable), Pedro Loayza (Vida de Santa Rosa),
and Luis Millones ( Una partecita).
11. Loayza (Vida, chap. 7) says that Rosa memorized the saint’s life story and that
Catherine became Rosa's teacher in a spiritual path centered around imitating Christ’s
suffering. Another biographer also describes Rosa’s close modeling of Catherine’s life; See
Acuna, Rosa mistica, 158. Mujica Pinilla (“El ancla,” 43, 74) suggests that Rosa probably read
Fray Fernando del Castillo’s edition of Catherine’s Vida (Valdecebro, 1669). Hansen (Vida,
ioov) also notes that Rosa read and imitated the life of the New Spanish hermit, Gregorio
Lopez (1542—1596).
 Notes to Pages 26—26 211

12. Millones studies this influential period of Rosa life in “Los Suenos” in Una
partecita.
13. Accounts disagree on whether Rosa wanted to become a nun. She had three
opportunities to enter a convent. While Loayza (Vida, 23), maintains that Rosa wanted to
enter the Convent of Santa Clara, other accounts say she refused to do so because of a
vision in which Catherine of Siena prophesied the founding of a Dominican convent in
Lima. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 64.
14. Proceso ordinario, fols. 138—139.
15. “Desde sus tiernos anos uso camas penitentes. La primera que tuvo fue de tres
maderos gruesos, uno mas que otro, y el que le servfa de cabecera tenia un hueco donde
encajaba la cabeza, de suerte que esta el cuerpo quebrantado o como un burro y cuando se
levantaba ponfa estos maderos debajo de la cama. Otra hizo la misma santa con siete palos,
entretejidos en forma de barbacoas, con unos cuernos de vaca, los cuales ponfa sobre una
tabla, y entre las junturas tenfa muchos tiestos de botija puntiagudos, sobre los cuales se
acostaba, no para dormir, sino para padecer. La tabla servfa para que los tiestecillos
estuvieran en pie y no se cayeran hacia abajo y los palos, para que con el cuerpo no se
ladeasen. En esta cama durmio quince o diez y seis anos” (Loayza, Vida, 14—15).
16. “Todas las noches se ensangrentava las espaldas tan dura y cruelmente que corria la
sangre por las paredes, suelo, y vestido, creia la inocente doncella que todos estos castigos
merecia por sus pecados. Demas destos conpadecida de las calmidades publicas procurava
con estas penitencias a imitacion a su Maestra [Catherine], aplaca la ira de Dios, y mitigar
su justicia, por lo qual unas vezes por los trabajos de toda la Sancta Madre Iglesia, otras
por las angustias y peligros que padecia la republica, heria a su cuerpo, haciendo de si
propia un sacrificio cruento sin alguna clemencia, para alcanzar de este modo la clemencia
del Cielo, y curar las llagas comunes con las propias” (Hansen, Vida, 37).
17. “‘Oh, quien fuese hombre, solo para ocuparme en la conversion de las almas,’ y asf
exhortaba a todos los predicadores con quien tenia conocimiento, que convirtiesen muchas
almas, y que fuesen a reducir a Dios a los idolatras de esta tierra. Y que pusiesen en esto el
bianco de sus estudios” (Loayza, Vida, 93).
18. “Ya la salud de la dicha benidita Rosa estava tan gastada y su natural con tantos
achaques y dolores que no podia travajar en sus lavores cosa considerable ni ayudar a sus
padres por aquella via como avia hecho en el discurso de su vida” (Proceso ordinario'). For a
transcription of Maza’s lengthy testimony about Rosa’s life in the Proceso ordinario and
Proceso apostolico, see Millones, Una partecita, 147—209. A selection of this testimony has been
translated into English, see Mills and Taylor, Colonial Spanish America, 194—202; a portion of
this is reproduced here in Appendix A.
19. For example, Marfa Luisa Melgarejo (.Proceso ordinario, 28v.) testifies to having flown
in an ecstatic state.
20. Testimony was recorded in 1670; see Martinez Hampe, Santidad, 70—71.
21. For an excellent chronology of the canonization process, see ibid., chaps. 3—4.
22. Proceso ordinario. The 1617 proceso was begun by the prelates of Lima. The original is
at the Convento de Santa Rosa in Lima. I consulted the copies at the Lilly Library,
Indiana University-Bloomington (a nineteenth-century copy) and the Secret Archives of
the Vatican (a contemporary, notarial copy). All citations are from the Lilly Library copy.
For more information on the proceso, see Martinez Hampe, Santidad, chap. 2.
23. A list of the witnesses is contained in the proceso itself. See Martinez Hampe’s
transcription of the list and his study in Santidad, chap. 2. Loayza’s Vida was not published
until much later. I use the 1965 Lima edition by the Dominican Fray Carlos Anfbal
Alvarez, which Frank Graziano graciously lent to me.
2i2 Notes to Pages 18—jz

24. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 177, and Martinez Hampe, Santidad, chap. 3. La Valle
(Las promesas ambiguas, 180—185) explains that two of Rosa’s biographers, Bilbao and
Melendez, played important roles in the Dominican schism. In addition, while the order
presented five Dominican candidates for sainthood, they were only allowed to promote
one; Martinez Hampe (Santidad, chap. 2) also cites the astronomical costs of the canoniza¬
tion process as another reason for it being tabled. See also Iwasaki, “Mujeres,” 581m.
25. For more on the role of the Inquisitor General, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 63.
26. The alumbrados of sixteenth-century Spam were mystics who sought direct
connection to God without the aid of the institutional church; they were accused of
rejecting the sacraments of the church and were condemned by the Inquisition as heretics.
27. The 1617 Proceso ordinario was invalid because it had not been initiated by Rome.
The original copies of the 1630 Proceso apostolico are at the Archbishop’s Archives in Lima,
Peru, and at the Secret Archive of the Vatican. See Martinez Hampe (1998), chap. 2, for a
complete list of the witnesses and their biographical information. Twelve of the 147
witnesses also testified in the 1617 proceso.
28. It was translated into Italian, English, French, and Spanish; Domingo Angulo
(Santa Rosa) lists many of these editions. The procurador for Rosa’s canonization, Antonio
Gonzalez de Acuna, wrote a compendium ( Rosa mistica) based on Hansen’s work, but it was
not published until 1671. In a lively narrative, he frequently quotes Rosa and other mystic
saints.
29. Medina’s Biblioteca extranjera de Santos reveals Rosa’s popularity as the subject of
hagiographic biographies. There are more than forty pages of vidas about her; Saint
Mariana de Quito has only twelve pages of material; Bishop Juan Palafox y Mendoza has
only fifteen.
30. For a full discussion of Rosa’s image and icongraphic tradition, see Mujica Pinilla,
“El ancla,” 54—214. Others have studied Rosa’s influence on Andean populations. Ross
(“Santa Rosa,” 187) argues that Rosa became associated early on with “fuerzas teluricas,
cosmicas, astrales.” Millones ( Una partecita, chap. 4) traces her role in Andean traditions
that still take place in August every year.
31. Melendez, Festiva, 4or.
32. La Valle (Las promesas') discusses the important role of Dominicans in the criollo
movement, with Rosa as perhaps their greatest symbolic success. For a history of this
process with respect to Rosa, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 158—171.
33. See especially, Oviedo y Herrera, Cantos I and III, Vida.
34. “Fragancias de buenos exemplos. . . han convertido en parayso de delicias santas
esta selva antes inculta de nuestra Meridional America” (quoted in Ribero Leal, Oracion).
35. Melendez, “A1 lector,” Festiva pompa.
36. See Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ.”
37. In 1568, Pope Pius V had purged the breviary of many legendary saints and
instituted other measures to reevaluate sainthood. Pope Urban VIII added to these
changes with his 1625 and 1634 rulings. See Burke, “How to Be a Counter Reformation
Saint,” 46.
38. For a more thorough discussion, see Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ,” 24.
39. In the first proceso there are between twenty-seven and thirty-two questions asked of
witnesses. Questions 1 to 7 deal with Rosa’s secular life: her birth, family, and early call to
God before becoming a third-order Dominican. Questions 8 to 22 examine Rosa’s life as a
religious woman: her virtues, asceticism, prayer, and special communication with God.
Most of these questions bear directly on the theological and cardinal virtues, as well as the
vows of a third-order Dominican. Questions 23 to 26 treat her last illness, death, and the
 Notes to Pages 32—J4 213

beginning of her cult and miracles. Question 27 certifies that all testimony is true and
freely given. The second proceso generally asked twenty-four to twenty-seven questions.
Another twelve were asked of some witnesses and dealt with miracles and intercessions
and the reliability of the witness. For a more thorough study of these procesos, see Martinez
Hampe, Santidad, chap. 2. For a transcription of the questions, names of witnesses, and
selected testimony, see Lopez, “The Roots of the Rose,” appendixes.
40. No fue sacada su historia de Relaciones apocrifas faltas de peso, y autondad, sino
de los procesos, que por mandato de la sede Apostolica se hicieron en Lima; para ponerla
en el Catalogo de los santos (Juan de Paz, Presentacion, ’ in Hansen Vida, unnumbered
preliminary pages).
41. Rosas first biographer, Loayza (Vida, 30—31), simply introduces the questioning
thusly: ‘Dios abrio el entendimiento a un singular varon seglar, doctor en medicina,
excelente filosofo y buen teologo, y en su teologia mistica admirable por tener esta ciencia
no solo con estudio, sino tambien de experiencia... Como se vera del examen que se sigue.
Preguntole el dicho Doctor: ‘/Y de que tiempo a esta parte se habia dado a la oracion?’
Respondio, que de edad de cinco anos,” Nothing is said about it being conducted with an
inquisitor present.
42. Proceso ordinario, first witness, Juan del Castillo.
43. For more on this examination and its representation in hagiographies, see Mujica
Pinilla, “El ancla,” 108—13.
44. “.. .para que por su sanctidad conste” (Hansen, Vida, 91).
45. “Se espanto con las respuestas de una nina sencilla y sin letras, quando preguntada
del secreto Mysterio de la Sanctissima Trinidad... que tantas cosas escondidas de los
sabios, y prudentes, revelaba y descubria a los humildes, pequeriuelos, y sin letras...
parecia a Lorenzana que via no a una muger, sino a un antiguo professor de una y otra
theologia” (ibid., 99—100).
46. “Se obrava con espiritu de Dios, que estava llena del don de sabiduria, que se
governaba con ciencia infusa del Cielo” (ibid., ioov).
47. For a full study of Castillo’s brush with the Inquisition, see Mujica Pinilla, “El
ancla,” 119—136. Quotation is from p. 117.
48. “Pues es mero seglar y no theologo”; “por aturdido y es el zensor de todas las
cosas de espiritu, con que quieren enganar a muchas mujercillas viendo que en otras es
mercanzia segura ha escrito un libro de revelaciones propias y quatro quadernos sobre el
compendio y rebelaciones de la madre Theresa” (quoted in ibid).
49. The sentence is as follows: “Habiendo visto todos los escritos, libro y quadernos del
Doctor Juan del Castillo medico en esta ciudad de los Reyes, familiar del Santo Oficio-nos
parece que contienen mui grandes disparates en rigor theologico y mistico, y algunas
contradicciones manifiestas en materia grave, y modo de hablar duro escabrosso fuera del
rigor de la theologia escholastica y mistica-y contienen algunas proposiciones temerarias y...
muchas rebelaciones ridiculas, visiones indignas... y considerado las qualidades y circun-
stancias de la persona melancolica, assi por el natural como por los muchos trabajos que tiene
ymaginatiba [rir] y con falta de sueno y comida como e'1 mismo confiessa en estos escritos, y
la mucha edad, y ha leido y mal entendido doctores, theologos y misticos, y es persona que
affecta espiritu de oracion-juzgamos que todas sus porposiciones y rebealciones son debaneos
procedidos de las cirunstancias dichas... de suerte que aunque el dicho libro y quadernos
contengan proposiziones... damnables... por colligirse del mismo libro y de las explica-
ciones que da... nos parece que tiene mas necesidad de medios medizinales para reparar la
naturaleza y flaqueza de cabeza que de otros que merescan condemnacion” (Edict of the
Inquisition, 24 April 1624, as cited in ibid., 118—119).
214 Notes to Pages 34—35

50. “Su vida era espejo de virtud” (Hansen, Santa Rosa, 91V).
51. See Iwasaki’s important article “Mujers al borde”on Malgarejo and the other
women following Rosa. He quotes the Inquisition’s notice that the notebooks had been
falsified because of her confessor’s censorship (p. 96).
52. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,’’ 58—61 and 2o2n28.
53. Although punishments were not severe, Galve and Iwasaki have read this search for
alumbrados among Rosa’s circle as a smokescreen to deflect negative attention from Rosa’s
own possible heterodoxy and to improve her chances for sainthood. Neither critic,
however, addresses the fact that Rosa’s close connection to people examined for hetero¬
doxy might also implicate her. As Mujica Pinilla notes (ibid., 59), Rosa had the same
confessor as one of the women and exchanged letters with another. He also notes that
many wrote spiritual notebooks (pp. 58—62). For more on the trials, see Galve, “Santa
Rosa”; Iwasaki, “Mujeres al borde”; and Medina, Historia, 27—32.
54. See the reproduction of the letters in Angulo, Santa Rosa, 334—339. See Getino, La
patrona, for reproductions of the collages and some of the poetry and prayers. The procesos
also record transcriptions of reported speech—that is, of the witness recalling Rosa’s
speech and citing it in the first person. One such example is the testimony by Juan del
Castillo that cites Rosa’s words during one of her raptures, as quoted in Getino, La patrona,
52—55. The proceso also includes a list of hers, given to Gonzalo de la Maza, who had it
transcribed in his testimony (it deals with the proper dressing of the Christ child), as cited
in Millones, Una partecita, 188—189.
55. “Como en varias ocasiones tengo escrito para gloria de Dios; A las mercedes q he
escrito as! en los cuadernos como. . . ” (Rosa de Santa Maria, Las Mercedes, f. 1).
56. The proceso includes the requests for Rosa’s “papeles y particulas de sus habitos,
huesos, o otras cosas tocantes a su persona,” as well as the replies that state that the material
had already been turned over (Proceso ordinario, fol. 217—218). The request came from the
Dominican Fray Luis de Bilbao, who was both one of Rosa’s confessors and a censor for the
Inquisition. Iwasaki (“Mujeres,” 594—595) also discusses the possibility of an autobiography
having been written. Rosa herself mentions her notebooks when explaining her collages; see
Getino, La patrona, 51, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 96. Wuffarden and Perez (“Esplendor,”
27—28) cite the records that discuss the censoring of her book of religious poetry.
57. In 1624, Fray Gabriel Zarate, prior of the Dominican monastery, reports turning
Rosa’s possessions and papers over to the Inquisition (letter appended to the ProceJo
ordinario, fol. 217).
58. Archivo Historico de la Nacion (Madrid), Inquisicion de Lima, Leg. 353, fol. 167
r.v., as quoted by Wuffarden and Perez, “Esplendor,” 27—28. My research at the Archivo
General de la Nacion and the Secret Archives of the Vatican turned up no such autobio¬
graphical documents.
59. Several Peruvian scholars made this suggestion at a recent conference organized by
Frank Graziano and held at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island
(May 1999).
60. “Carta de Santa Rosa de Santa Marfa al P. Fr. Geronimo Bautista,” in Angulo,
Santa Rosa, 237-239. Rosa’s two other letters are a note of thanks and a discussion of a
spiritual topic.
61. See Getino’s reproduction of these in La patrona, 15—55 and 73. The reproduction in
this chapter is courtesy of Ramon Mujica Pinilla and taken from “El ancla,” 104-105.
62. Hansen, “Ninez, natural, educacion y voto de virigindad,” Vida, chap. 2.
63. “Cosa es de maravillar que en cuerpo tan flaco, y consumido con tantos ayunos,
hubiesse lugar donde recibir azotes, y sangre que derramar con ellos. No obstante era tan
 Notes to Pages 36—3 y 215

grande el deseo, y cuydado que Rosa tenia de castigar su cuerpo que fue necesario que sus
confessores le fuessen a la mano en esto” (ibid., 43r, 37r).
64. “Dejame la avecilla, / huye el veloz cantor, / mas siempre esta conmigo / mi
dulce Redentor. / Pajarillo ruisenor, / alabemos al Senor; / tu alaba a tu Creador, / yo
canto a mi Salvador (as cited in Getino, La patrona, 66; also see Loayza, Vida, chap. 19).
65. “Oh, Jesus de mi alma! / Que bien pareces / entre Flores y Rosas / y Olivas
verdes” (as cited in Proceso ordinario, 45r).
66. Other prayers attributed to her included “Alabanzas de Dios,” which is also
quoted in the proceso, and in Actos de contricion. Several of these were published with some
frequency in the latter part of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth.
See, for example, Exercicio angelico (1723) held at the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana.
67. “Favores que recibio N.M. y Patrona Santa Rosa de Santa Maria, como lo
significan estos escritos de su letra y puno” (Rosa de Santa Maria, Las meredes, 69). Getino
(La patrona, 18) suggests that this note may have been written by a nun at the convent. More
typically, confessors made written comments in religious women’s texts. For other
reproductions of the Mercedes, see the dissertation theses by Ibanez-Murphy, “^Primera
escritora?,” and Lopez, "The Roots of the Rose.”
68. “Lo que remito a Nuestro Padre como a mi unico Padre espiritual, para que corrija
mis yerros, y enmiende lo que en dicha obra faltare por mi ignorancia. Muchos yerros y
faltas hallara por ser explicada de mi mano y si se hallare que es bueno, sera solo por haber
sido las mercedes de Dios” (ibid., 69),
69. “Confieso con toda verdad en presencia de dios que todas las mercedes que he
escrito asi en los cuadernos como esculpinadas y retratadas en estos dos papeles ni las he
visto ni leido en libro alguno, solo i obradas en esta pecadora de la poderosa mano del
Senor en cuyo libro leo que es Sabidurfa Eterna” (ibid., 69).
70. “Estas tres mercedes recibf de la piedad divina antes de la gran tribulasion que
padeci en la confesion general por mandado de aquel confesor que me dio tanto en que
merecer depues de haber hecho la confesion general y de haber padesido cerca de dos anos
de grandes penas, tribulaciones, desconsuelos, desamparos, tentaciones, batallas con los
demonios, calunias de confesores y de las criaturas. Enfermedades, dolores, calentura y
para decir lo todo las mayores penas de infierno que se puedan imaginar en estos anos
ultimos habra unos cinco anos que recibo del Senor las mercedes que en ese medio pliego
de papel he puesto, por inspiracion del corazon aunque indigno” (ibid., 70).
71. See Weber’s important work on the topic, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetorics of
Femininity.
72. See Mujica Pinilla’s quotes from biographies and procesos in “El ancla,” 114—115.
73. For a list of Rosa’s confessors, see Iwasaki, “Mujeres,” 591; Vargas Urgarte, Laflor
de Lima, 27; and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 51.
74. One scholar notes Fdildegard of Bingen’s illuminated works about her visionary life
and John of the Cross’s sketches of his visions, but neither of these authors place word
and image in an intimate emblematic relationship. See Ibanez-Murphy, “;Primera
escritora?”, 128—134. See also the studies of heart imagery in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth century in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists.
75. Catherine of Siena used the imagery of the ladder as well; see Noffke's introduc¬
tion to her translation of Catherine of Siena’s works, in The Dialogue.
76. See Ibsen’s (Women’s Spiritual Autobiography, 102, 114) work on the link between vision,
meditation, and prayer in this period, and the popularity of the heart as an emblem. For
more on emblem books in this period, see Campa’s Fmblemata Hispanica, a study of Spanish
emblem books.
216 Notes to Pages 37—46

77. In Vida, chap. 14, Hansen notes Castillo’s use of Paz’s work.
78. For more on this topic, see Astell’s study, The Song of Songs.
79. "Herido con flecha de amor”; “eferma de amores, que muero de ella”; “harpon de
fuego”; “dardo de amor divino”; “la vida es cruz”; “deposorio espiritual” (Rosa de Santa
Marfa, Steps 5—14). For a more complete discussion of these steps and hearts, see Lopez,
“The Roots of the Rose,” 544—554; Getino, La patrona, 15—55; Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,”
98—107; and Ibanez-Murphy, “^Primera escritora?”, 182—205.
80. “Arrobo. Embriaguez en la bodega. Secretos del amor Divino. ;Oh dichosa union,
abrazo estrecho con Dios!” (Rosa de Santa Maria, Step 15).
81. “Teologo muy hecho y consumado” (Cited in Pinilla Mujica, “El ancla,” 113—114).
82. For more about the politics of sanctity and the careful representation of Teresa’s
life and works, see Alhgren, Teresa of Avila, and Slade, Teresa.
83. Van Deusen, “Instituciones religiosas”; Iwasaki, "Mujeres.”
84. “Hasta oy... aunque aviendose levantado en esta dicha ciudad ciertas mujeres que
se dezfa trataban de espfritu lo qual parescio despues no ser encammado al servicio de
Dios porque algunas fueron castigadas esas comunicaban a la dicha Soror Rossa por
ventura para acreditar sus acciones y como se descubrio el pecado de aquellas se resfrio
algo el credito de la dicha Rossa... y despue’s que cesso el ruydo y castigo a las dichas
mugeres volvio a prevalecer el buen credito de la dicha Soror Rossa” (Ramirez de Baldez,
Proceso apostolico, as cited in Mujica-Pinilla, “El ancla,” 63).
85. See Scott, “Urban Spaces, Women’s Networks,” 64—105.
86. “Siendo para una Virgen el lugar mas apto la clausura de un monasterio”
(Santander y Torres, Sermon, 4—6).
87. For more on the creation of Teresa as a saint, see the studies by Alghren, Teresa of
Avila, and Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa. Also see Scott (“Catherine of Sienna,” 44), who
argues that the Council of Trent successfully promoted Catharine of Siena as a model
Counter-Reformation saint by altering certain biographical details.

Chapter 2
This chapter is based on my previously published article “Testimony for Canonization or
Proof of Blasphemy? The New Spanish Inquisition and the Hagiographic Biography of
Catarina de San Juan,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (1999). I have
revised several important elements: I include here an analysis of the third part of Ramos’s
work and have reworked my observations on the role of race and hagiography. My sincere
gratitude goes to Grady Wray and Antonio Rubial for their help in locating archival
material, and to Jodi Bilinkoff and Mary E. Giles for their useful suggestions in revising
this manuscript.
1. The Cabildo’s scribe writes a juridical testimony of the event: “Fue tan excessivo el
consurso de gente de todos estados, y calidades, que con gravissima dificultad pude
conseguir la entrada en dicha cassa.” He goes on to list the high-ranking officials present
at the event, “Dos testimonies juridicos,” in Ramos, De los prodigios, vol. 3, 113—114.
2. Greenleaf, Mexican Inquisition.
3. When compared with its Spanish counterpart, the New Spanish Inquisition played
a more passive role—mostly receiving denuncias without prosecuting a large percentage of
cases because of the overwhelmingly large territory it had to cover and the relatively few
subjects it had jurisdiction over. See Alberro, La actividad del Santo Oficio, 82-84.
4. For a general overview of the role of books and the Inquisition in New Spain, see
Leonard’s Books of the Brave, and the work edited by Gonzalez Obregon, Lihros y lihreros en el
siglo XVI.
 Notes to Pages 46—32. 217

5. Ramos, De los prodigios . .. , 3 vols.

6. Graxeda, Compendio de la vida.
7. For a more thorough historical sketch of her life story, see Morgan, “Saints,
Biographers and Identity,” chap. 5.
8. Testamentc in Ramos, De los prodigios, vol. 3, 116.
9. For a fuller discussion of these biographies and their role in New Spanish society,
see Rubial, La santidad controvertida, and Destefano, “Miracles and Monasticism.”
10. Ramos goes so far as to say that Marla Jesus was Catarina’s “spiritual twin” (De los
prodigios, vol. 3, no). For hagiographic biographies of these two nuns, see Salmeron, De la
vida de la venerable Madre Isabel de la Encarnacion, and Lemus, Vida, birtudes, trabajos,fabores y
milagros.
11. “No podia Senor dedicarse el fin, y corona de esta obra sino a la Muy Illustre e
Imperial Ciudad de la Puebla de los Angeles; porque si el grande Emperador Carlos V...
la quiso ennoblecer con sus mismas armas... Desde que la Sierva de Dios entro en esta
Cuidad tuvo a pares las armas, las del Emperador, que la ennoblecen, y las de Catharina,
que la defienden; fue la Venerable Sierva de Dios, las armas mas eficaces de la Puebla pues
tantas veces la defendio de los enemigos” (Ramos, “Dedicatoria,” De los prodigios, vol. 3).
12. See, for example, the vidas of the Carmelite Indian woman Francesca de Miguel
(cited in Rivas, “Gran cosa,” hi); one studied by Lavrin in “Indian Brides,” 232; the short
sketches of several indias in the Convento of Jesus Marfa, El paraiso occidental by Sigiienza y
Gongora; and, of course, those in the Las indias caciques de Corpus Christi, edited by Muriel. A
new study by Dfaz, “Genero, raza,” examines this question further.
13. This is based on my own searches through catalogues of works published and a
consultation with Antonio Rubial.
14. Destefano (“Miracles and Monasticism,” 68) finds reference to its continued
prohibition in a 1790 index of books that also includes all three volumes of Ramos’s
biography.
15. See Rubial, “Mariofanfas” (17), in which he explains church doctrine regarding the
different manifestations of the Virgin Mary.
16. “Mira esta blanca, y hermosa es Santa Ines; esotro hermosa, y blanca es Santa
Catharina Martyr, esta triguena eres tu. Tu eres la mas hermosa” (Aguilera, Sermon, 103).
17. As cited in the opening to the chapter: “No podia Senor dedicarse el fin, y corona
de esta obra sino a la Muy Illustre e Imperial Ciudad de la Puebla de los Angeles; porque
si el grande Emperador Carlos V... la quiso enoblecer con sus mismas armas anadiendoles
el Plus Ultra en las dos columnas, y dos Angeles, que las sustentan, desde que la Sierva de
Dios entro en esta Ciudad tuvo a pares las armas, las del Emperador, que la ennoblecen, y
las de Catharina, que la defienden; fue la Venerable Sierva de Dios, las armas mas eficaces
de la Puebla pues tantas veces la defendio de los enemigos” (Ramos, “Dedicatoria,” De los
prodigios, vol. 3).
18. In the transcription of Ramos’s text, I have maintained period spelling and
accentuation except for v for u, v for b, and tildes, which replace constants following
vowels (often for nasalized n) or are used to abbreviate que.
“Crescio tanto la dissension, y porfia entre los Pyratas; que divididos en Bandos
llegaron a esgirmir las espadas, y jugar las Lanzas; hasta, que uno de los Soldados, viendo
tan ensagrentada la rina: dixo (hablando con sus Companeros) muera una porque no
perescamos todos: semejante voz dixo Caiphas Pontifice a los Judios en el Concilio, que
formo su malicia contra Christo; pero este Soldado sin consejo, diciendo, y haciendo,
arrojo un Chuzo, O Lanza a esta innocente nina con animo de quitarla la vida; para que la
vida de una innocente Cordera fuesse Arco de Paz entre tantos delinquentes. Pero no
218 Notes to Pages jq—JJ

sucedio lo que pretendia el inadvertido, y cruel Pyrata; porque huyendo el cuerpo la nina,
o declinando el impulso de la Lanza la superior mano, le atraveso solo un muslo; y la
Sangre, que salio de la herida, basto para que lastimados, y compassivos, cessassen en la
colera, y la pendencia; y que dejando todos las armas, acudiessen a curarla; y assi fuesse
lazo de union, y Concordia su innocente Sangre vertida. Volvieronse luego a los Bageles, y
se quedo con la prisionera uno de los principales Capitanes, que la havia ganado, con
obligacion de curarla, y tratarla como a hija y no como a esclava” (Ramos, De los prodigios,
vol. i, 17).
19. The referent of “she” and “her” switches back and forth without notice between
the Mogul lady and Mirrha, in the original as in the translation.
“Determino esta zelosa desaogar su ira con la belleza, que juzgaba causa, u occassion
de su desprecio; procurando quitarle su natural hermosura; maltratabala con palabras, y
con obras: pretendiendo muchas vezes consumirla, desgrenandola a repelones; arrastrabala
de sus cabellos, azotabala, aporreabala, y afeaba sus mexillas, con la Sangre, que derramaba
por las heridas. Procuraba que la hambre marchitasse el color, y gracias de su rostro: y
finalmente fue el yunque de una muger vengativa sobre zelosa sin mas delito que ser
hermosa, y amada Myrrha; y sin mas occassion que ser objepto de un aborrescimiento
invidioso. Crecio este tan hasta lo summo, que no satisfaciendose bastantemente su ira, ni
templandosse su rabia con la sangre de una innocente cordera; trato de quitarle muchas
vezes la vida. Prevenia los cuchillos su enojo, con determinacion de matarla: pero el temor,
de que la Sangre vertida diesse vozes, como la de Abel, que clamo contra el invidiosos
fratricida, la cortaba, y detenia. Pareciole que matandola sin Sangre, y a escondidas
quedaria su maldad occulta; y asi se resolvio a otro hecho mas aleboso; que fue arrojarla al
mar con el peso de una piedra, para que se atribuyesse a contingente desgracia, lo que era
estudiada malicia de su rabia. Executo ayrada la traycion, pero por dicha de Myrrha tubo
prevenida la Providencia Divina una Ancla en el puesto donde cayo, para que assiendose
de su Cable pudiesse sacar la cabeza del agua; y pedir a vozes ayuda, favor y el Baptismo,
que era ya su principal, y unico cuydado, socorriola un hidalgo Portugues que estaba cerca
del mar, como prevenido instrumento de la Omnipotencia Divina, para que la librasse del
naufragio, y guardasse como en otros riesgos la vida. Con esta feliz desgracia depositaron
en otra casa a esta Nina; donde viendola el amante Mogor macilenta y desfigurada su
hermosura, y belleza, passo su amor a la dama Mogora, que con tantas ansias le pretendia”
(Ramos, De los prodigios, vol. 1, 18).
20. Ramos’s narrative in volume 1 comprises 136 folios and in volume 2, 177 folios;
recall that the total number of pages is double the number of folios. In addition, both
volumes have rather lengthy indexes.
21. “Un monstruo Pez, cuya fealdad, y fiereza la causaba horror, y que no podia
explicar, llamadole ya Tiburon, ya Cayman, ya Monstruo Marino; porque su forma era
extraordinaria, y abominable, y sus escamas con tales pintas, y manchas, que le hacian
horrible a la vista” (Ramos, De los prodigios, vol. 2, 119).
22. “Lector, que era digna esta vission de mas profundas, y estendidas glosas,
comparala con lo que nos dejo escrito el Evangelista San Juan en el capitulo doze de su
Apocalysis, y hallaras, quan uniforme es Dios en hablar, y comunicar sus secretos en todos
los tiempos a sus Siervos y escogidos, veras tambien, que como no pudo dexar de
verificarse todo lo que mostro a su Sagrado Benjamin de la Catholica Iglesia, siempre
perseguida, y siempre vencedora en figura de una prodigiosa muger” (ibid., 120).
23. For example: “Sucediame algunas vezes, entre asombros, y admiraciones, ponderar
conmigo mismo, la grandeza de k divina Luz, que ilustra a esta esclarecida Virgen,
admirandome, de que siendo en lo natural vozal, y muy cerrada, se explicase con tanta
 Notes to Pages Jj—j] 219

eloquencia, con tal energia, y con expresiva tan propria en materias tan profundas, y tan
varias, que parecia estaba debaxo de la Esphera de su vista todo el umverso, sin que se le
servasen los secretos del Cielo, ni los pensamientos, y secretos de los corazones de los
hombres. Con esta admiracion, la dije un dia: ‘Catharina, que necesidad ay, de que te
manifieste Dios tantos, y tan desacostumbrados secretos, y mystenos?’ A esta pregunta, me
respondio con sinceridad, e innocencia: ‘No se, que responderle, Padre y senor mio, no se
si esto es malo o si es bueno; yo digo lo que me pasa, y se lo dejo a mis Confessores, para
que como doctos, y esperimentados, lo apruebaen; pero lo que ahora entiendo es; que me
trata, y comunica Jesus, como se pueden tratar, y comunicar aca en lo humano los dos mas
tiernos amantes: y como no permite el amor, que entre dos amigos aya cosa oculta, en
secreta: assi Dios se muestra Amante, comunicandome lo mas oculto de sus Mysterios.’
Esta respuesta de Catharina, es el estilo, que a guardado dios con sus amigos en todos los
tiempos” (ibid., 69).
24. “En una occasion, se le dexo ver el Senor, en la misma forma de Nino, pero casi
desnudo, al modo, que solemos vestir sus Imagenes en la Solemnidad de su Resurrecion, o
Natividad en el Pesebre: Andaba en aquel tiempo, muy cuydadosa Catharina de vestir a
Christo desnudo en su Santissimo Nacimiento, y con la dicha apparicion parece le
respondio al Senor a sus desseos, diciendole, como quien se le queria arroja a su regazo, y
castos abrazos: Catharina visteme? La charidad, y amor de esta su amada, y querida Esposa,
credo con esta vision, casi hasta causar excesso mental en el corazon, y la hubiera
arrebatado su impulso, a coger al Nino Dios entre sus brazos, a no detenerla las prisiones
de su Virginal recato, dandola temor la desnudez de su Unico, y Divino Amante: y assi le
dixo, o pregunto que porque no venia vestido? Que si le faltaban Angeles, y Madre, que
cubriessen con preciosa telas la Hermosura, Y Belleza, en que se miraban, y gozaban los
Cortesanos del Cielo? Respondiola, que queria fuesse ella quien lo vistiesse, y adornase.
Replied Catharina, que ella no tenia con que vestirle, ni manos para tocarle, ni aun ojos
para mirarle desnudo, y procurando apartar la vista de aquel Dios de Pureza, Su Divino
Amante, quisiera esconderse, y rehundirse en el centro de la tierra... Pero quando mas
descuydada, se hallaba otra vez con el mismo objecto, y con demostraciones, y con mas
carinosas ansias de recibir de mano de su Amada, el vestido, que la pedia. Aunque
respondia Catharina, con nuevas, mayores, y mas cumplidas repugnancias de su amorosa
Pureza; la dexase, que se fuesse, que se ausentarse; porque la rredraba, y acobardaba aquel
desnudez de su Divinidad Humanada; y que no se hallaba con fuerzas para abrazarle;
viendole tan desnudo, que la causaba no menos confusion, que Divino horror, hasta que le
viesse decentemente a los ojos humanos vestido. Duro esta amorosa lucha, entre el Divino
Amor, y su querida Esposa, mas de dos anos” (ibid,, vol. 1, 98—99).
25. For example, in the third volume, Ramos includes the doctor’s full report upon
Catarina’s death (ibid., vol. 3, 83).
26. "Hasta aqui el hecho, y vission historica, en la qual, aunque extraordinaria
remirandola con la debida consideracion, no hallo cosa opuesta, o dissona a la Doctrina
Christiana, y Catholica Theologia del Baptismo; pero porque puede hacer alguna fuerza, y
ocasionar varios discursos esta noticia divulgada entre hombres Doctos, e indoctos, me ha
parecido conveniente explicarla, diciendo primero mi sentir, y despues lo que se puede
discurrir careando toda la vission; y su significacion con las luzes de la Fee Catholica, con
las sentencias de los Santos, y Theologos, que son interpretes de La Ley de Christo en su
Santa Iglesia” (ibid., 55).
27. “Como hasta entonces no la entendio, quiso valerse ya de caricias, ya de amenazas,
ya de rigores, pero ella solo se valla de la verdad con que lo amonesto y se valla de las
voces que a su Divino Esposo daba, y se valla de muchas y devotas ansias con que llamaba
220 Notes to Pages jy—jg

a la Virgen Marfa. A estas resistencias de Catarina, si crecfan en el los enfados, las

irascibles y los malos tratos, en ella crecfa mas la fijeza de su prometimiento y voto
(Graxeda, Compendia, 59).
28. Fue siempre esta venerable y devota mujer compuesta en sus acciones, medida en
sus palabras, cuerda en sus respuestas, recatada en sus obras, discreta sin afectos, politica
sin ceremonias, silenciosa sin demasfas” (ibid., 50).
29. “Antes de pasar adelante quiero prevenir con acuerdo una pregunta que pueda
pulsar con viveza a cualquiera persona, y sea el decir que por que causa refiero virtudes de
Catarina, que ejercito en aquella temprana edad en que vivfa? Y como doy razon tan por
extenso de lo que yo no vi por entonces? Y ademas de esto si no lo vi? Luego ella me las
referfa cuando la comunique, repugnancia que hace al buen espfritu porque este solo dice
sus faltas, no sus virtudes, pues estas se dejan al conocimiento de quien dirige” (ibid., 49).
30. “No averiguo de esta merced el modo con que recibio, si fue enajenada de los
sentidos y potencias o si fue vision imaginaria o si la recibio visiblemente, pues queriendo
yo saber de la suerte de que le paso me solfa decir” (ibid., 28).
31. According to Rubial (Ramo Inquisition, v. 678) this edict is in the Archivo
General de la Nacion in Mexico. I quote it from de la Maza’s excerpt, Catarina de San Juana,
116. See Rubial, “Mariofanfas,” iyn6.
32. “Por contenerse en el, revelaciones, visiones y apariciones inutiles, inverosfmiles,
llenas de contradicciones y comparaciones impropias, indecentes y temerarias, que sapiunt
blasphemias (que casi son blasfemias), abusando del Misterio Altfsimo e Inefable de la
Encarnacion del Hijo de Dios, y otros lugares de la Sagrada Escritura, y doctrinas
temerarias, peligrosas y contrarias al sentir de los Doctores, y practica de la Iglesia
Universal, sin mas fundamento que la vana credulidad del autor” (as quoted by Leon,
Catarina de San Juan, 89—91).
33. His first volume opens with the largest amount of prefatory material I have seen
in any period text published in New Spain. Ramos opens with a long dedication to
Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz, in which he highlights how Catarina de San Juan
herself bestowed him with the authority to write her life story, and he extends that
privilege to the bishop, as pastor of the flock that includes Catarina (and who, of
course, had the power to approve the biography). Listed in narrative order, the
remaining preforatory material includes a lengthy letter by Nunez de Miranda, three
“Aprobaciones” by two calificadores and a theologian, a license from the Viceroy
Conde de Galve, four “Aprobaciones” or “Pareceres” written by some of the leading
ecceliastical figures in Puebla upon the request of Bishop Santa Cruz, a license by Santa
Cruz himself, and, finally, the necessary license by Ramos’s Jesuit superior, the
provincial of the order in New Spain.
34. Two letters address more specifically what lies at the heart of the book’s trial: the
church’s efforts to control both heresy and sanctity. Villa mentions Pope Urban VII’s
edicts in 1625, 1631, and 1640 regulating the process for canonization of holy people; from
then on, it was to be centralized, under the domain of Rome. Vaca also acknowledges the
pope’s authority for having the final word and, meanwhile, makes a case for the truth of
Catarina’s case and the need for a saint like her. Aware of the concerns about her
“prodigiosa” life (that is, the abundance of miracles and visions), he enumerates evidence
for its credibility.
35. The licenses include Bishop of Mexico Francisco Aguiar y Seijas (not Bishop Santa
Cruz, since the second volume is published in Mexico City) and the provincial of the
Jesuit order (Ambrosio Oddon), as well as two brief “pareceres” from a well-known
Dominican friar (Juan de Gorospe) and another Jesuit (Josep Vidal).
 Notes to Pages J9~62 221

36. The prefatory material to volumes 2 and 3 includes a long personal letter to Ramos,
in which Ambrosio Oddon responds to Ramos’s inquiry about the doctrinal content in
volume 2. Ostensibly a parallel to Nunez’s letter in the first volume, Oddon’s is not as
privileged in narrative order as it is placed at the end of the published material, and it
contains none of the seriousness of tone or concern found in Nunez’s. Rather, Oddon
exuberantly praises the wonder of Catarina’s life and the manifestation of divine grace in it.
37. “En obediencia del decreto de Nuestro Santissimo Padre Urbano VIII, de feliz
recordacion, Expedido de la Sagrada Congregacion de la Universal Inquision de la Iglesia a
13 de marzo de 1675, declarado por su Santidad en 5 de junio del ano de 1631, y confirmado
en 5 de julio de 1634 en que se prohibe dar culto de Santidad a las personas no Canoniza-
das Protesto que todas las veces, que en esta Historia uso las palabras Santa Bienaben-
turada, Venerable, Esclarecida, o qualquiera otra, que insinue virtud resebrante, assi de la
persona que es assumpto de esta obra; como de qualquiera otra, que con esta occasion
nombro con estos, o semejantes epitetos, no es mi intento cayga sobre la persona, dandole
el culto debido a los Santos, que con defincion de la Santa Iglesia esta en el Cielo; sino
sobre las costumbres, y opinion. Item protesto, que todas las cosas, que refiero con
nombre de Ilustraciones, Revelaciones, Raptos, Extasis, Prophecias, Milagros, y otros
favores extraordinarios, no tienen mas authoridad que la humana, fundada en motivo,
humanos, expuestos a la falibilidad, reservando siempre la infalible decision al Oraculo del
Espiritu Santo el Romano Pontifice en su Canonica declaracion a que me sujeto en todo;
como Hijo obediente de la Santa Iglesia Catholica Romana, Nuestra Madre” (Ramos, De
los prodigios, vol. 3, 129).
38. “Que se sepa y entienda que cuanto yo referiere en este escrito, lo vf, lo experi-
mente y hice aquellas pruebas que tales materias piden para la verificacion de su fidelidad,
verdad y legalidad, y puesta la mano en el pecho, haciendo la serial de la santa cruz, Iuro in
verbo Sacerdoitis decir verdad en todo” (Castillo Graxeda, Compendio, 16).
39. “Solo el que aquf referire basta para comprobarlos todos, y por haber sido notorio
a muchas personas que lo vieron, de que pueden dar fe, que yo los demas los dejo porque
en materias de milagros, como son puntos de suyo tan diffciles de averiguar y tan
reservados al conocimiento de la iglesia por los que tienen este ministerio de oficio, no
quiero que sirvan de embarazo para el credito de las virtudes de esta sierva de Dios, ni
tampoco para alargar esta historia que solo sirve de despertar y conmover la devocion de
los fieles” (ibid., 199).
40. Ibid., 200.
41. Ibid., 201—202.
42. See Castillo Graxeda, Compendio, “Introduction.”
43. [Catarina] "En verdad angel mlo, que vuesastedes dicen el verdady as{ echen ruego a Dios no me
perda. ”
[Graxeda] Que quiso decir: “En verdad que dicen vuestras mercedes la verdad y
sienten lo que yo soy, que soy una embustera y aun por eso pido por amor de Dios
rueguen por ml, no se pierda mi alma; ya conozco que soy china, ya veo que soy basura,
que soy una inmundicia y que soy una perra, pero por el mismo caso, asi de lo que
considerais como de lo que me decfs, por eso propio os suplico hagais especial peticion
para que yo tenga buen fin” (Castillo Graxeda, Compendio, 112).
44. See Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” 46.
45. The concept of decorum was important to the period and is evident in other
works. For example, Mercado writes a brief biography about a Philippine servant for the
Jesuits and uses a direct simple style in El cristiano virtuoso; and Sigiienza y Gongora
discusses the need to write in a non-florid style because he is writing a history de mugeres
2Z2 Notes to Pages 6z—yi

y para mugeres” in his chronicle of a Mexican convent, Par also occidental For a discussion of
the former, see Myers, “La influencia mediativa”; for the latter, see Ross’s The Baroque
Narrative of Carlos de Sigiienza y Gongora, chap. 2.
46. Barnes-Karol, "Religious Oratory.”
47. I have been unable to locate the list of rules in effect in the 1690s, but these 1707
rules would have been similar.
48. For a full reproduction of the rules and an interesting study of them, see Perez-
Marchand, Dos etapas ideologicas; see also Ramos Soriano, “Critierios inquisitoriales.”
49. As mentioned, Palafox was another Puebla figure who had a popular following
because he was considered to have died in the odor of sancity; he had also known
Catarina. The edict must have been thoroughly carried out, because even the portrait of
Catarina in Ramos’s work has been removed from most extant copies. The edict is cited in
Destefano, “Miracles and Monasticism,” 27 and 72ni9-
50. All three biographies note that in her lifetime and soon after her death, Catarina de
San Juan had throngs of people seeking her intercessory powers. Others traveled as many
as 300 leagues to consult with Catarina (Ramos, De los proiigios, vol. 3, 44) and others were
cured by holding tightly to her portrait (Graxeda, “Compendio,” chap. 30).
51. To date, Francisco de la Maza and Leon are among the few that have worked with
archival material and pieced together the series of events and edicts that help provide a
fuller picture of the dynamics of religious belief, literary representation, and institutional
rules.
52. Letter from the Mexican Inquisition to the Spanish Inquisitor General, December
15, 1695, quoted in Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal, 321.
53. See Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan, 118—119.
54. Finding historical records in which Catarina is named in the late eighteenth or
nineteenth centuries—such as the reprinting of Graxeda’s biography—would support the
conclusion that a cult may have not been entirely averted. According to de la Maza
(Catarina de San Juan, chap. 3), a mid-eighteenth-century edition of Graxeda is noted by a
bibliographer, but he has been unable to find this edition.
55. My thanks go to Antonio Rubial for this observation.
56. Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” 49.
57. The Catholic Church’s change in policy is seen when in the 1960s it canonized a
sixteenth-century Peruvian man of African descent, Martin de Porres.
58. For more on this convent and the role of race, see works by Diaz, “Genero, raza,”
Lavrin, “Indian Brides,” and Melendez, “El perfil economico.”
59. See Greer, “Iroquois Virgin.”
60. I was unable to find any record of it at the Secret Archives of the Vatican.

Chapter j
Much of the material for this chapter draws on the lengthy studies of Maria de San Jose’s
life and journals in Myers and Powell, A Wild Country out in the Garden. Consult chapters 1-2
for more detailed analyses of her family and writings. The original manuscript by Marfa de
San Jose does not have folios consistently marked throughout the twelve volumes, so
references to it in this chapter note only the volume number or the page number in our
translation, A Wild Country.
1. Santander y Torres, Vida, 53, 56, 273, and 283.
2. Over a period of approximately twenty-five years (1691?—1717), Marfa de San Jose
produced over two thousand pages recounting her secular and religious life. The autobio¬
graphical manuscript (Spanish Codex 39-41), owned by the John Carter Brown Library,
 Notes to Pages jl—74 223

Providence, Rhode Island, totals 1,102 folios. In most cases, if the individual volumes have
been numbered, either by Maria or her confessors, it is by folio (therefore every other page)
and also by quademo (which we have translated by its modern Spanish equivalent, “note¬
book”). The quademo consists of a unit of three or four large sheets of paper folded into
quartos, thus producing either twelve or sixteen folios and twenty-four or thirty-two pages
per quaderno. These quademos were doled out by her confessor and, when filled, returned to
him. They are, therefore, significant units of composition, and the author herself often refers
to her own writing by quaderno. For more on the nature of the manuscript and its contents,
consult Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, appendices A and B.
3. If the manuscript was returned to the archives at the Convent of La Soledad in the
1720s, it most likely remained there until the Juarez Reforms (1860s), when many convents
were secularized. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of
the twentieth, conventual archives often were maintained for a time by patrons; but
sometimes they later passed into private hands and were sold. Indeed, few Mexican
conventual archives remained intact by the end of the Mexican Revolution. Because there
is no acquisition record for the manuscript at the John Carter Brown Library (complete
records were not kept until 1920), we can only conjecture that the manuscript left La
Soledad sometime after 1865 and arrived at the library before 1920.
4. In Culturafeminina (320—321), Muriel says this manuscript is lost.
5. Arenal and Schlau, Franco, and Muriel all use Santander y Torres’s rewritten
passages of Marfa’s text as though they were entirely her own words. See selections in
Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters; Franco, Plotting Women, chap. 1, and Muriel, Cultura feminina,
360—365. While twentieth-century scholars’ use of these quotes raised awareness of the
existence of dozens of women like Madre Marfa who wrote in the convent, their works
typically assumed that biographers like Santander y Torres followed rigorous twentieth-
century scholarly standards for quoting sources verbatim.
6. See chronology for a complete listing of these documents.
7. Kate Greenspan explains her borrowing of this term and its reference to medieval
and early modern women’s mixture of confessional and hagiographic narratives in “The
Autohagiographic Tradition.”
8. See Destefano, “Introduction” in “Miracles and Monasticism,” and Rubial,
“Introduccion” in La santidad controvertida.
9. The women were Marfa Magdalena, famous for her heroic tolerance of forty-four
years of being bed-ridden; the Carmelite nun Isabel de la Encarnacion; and Marfa de Jesus,
who had worked with Catarina de San Juan and later became the city’s patron. Bishop
Santa Cruz initiated an assertive campaign in an attempt to canonize Marfa de Jesus. See
Rubial, La santidad controvertida, 161—198.
10. Marfa discusses this relationship in volume 1.
11. For a thorough biographical study of Marfa de San Jose s secular and religious life,
see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, chap. 1.
12. All quotes are taken from Myers and Powell, A Wild Country. This one is from p. 15.
13. In the mid-i670s Marfa’s sister Leonor entered the Carmelite Convent of San Jose,
and Francisca entered the Convent of San Jeronimo—both in Puebla. The three Palacios
sisters who married—Marfa, Isabel, and Catarina—made important social and economic
family alliances with elite landowners and a bureaucrat; one (Isabel) eventually became a
widow who used her legal right to initiate court proceedings in order to keep her property.
The marriages of these Palacios sisters reflect both the limited circle of eligible men
among their cousins and the neighboring landowners and a policy of marital alliances
calculated to maintain the family estates. See Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 256—258.
224 Notes to Pages 74—51

14. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 267.

15. Ibid., 68.
16. Ibid., 91.
17. Ibid., 86.
18. Letter from Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz to Marla’s confessor, in Santander y
Torres, Vida, unnumbered preliminary pages.
19. For more on this incident, see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 274—276.
20. All of Marfa de San Jose’s visions fall into orthodox, doctrinal categories for such
passive spiritual activity: a vision could be one of three types or a combination of several.
The first type, corporeal visions, produced specific knowledge via the physical senses,
being seen or perceived with the body’s own eyes, ears, touch, smell, or even taste. The
second type of vision, classified as imaginary, stemmed from the imago or image of God
and bypassed the physical senses, imprinting itself directly on the imagination, in the
mind’s eye. Although the third type of vision is the least frequent, Marfa de San Jose also
describes experiences with this highest type of vision, the spiritual or “intellectual” vision.
Neither seen nor heard, but taking the form of inspiration, intuition, or revelation, they
were considered the least likely to be caused by delusion and could serve, it was held, as
great aids for understanding God. Visionaries traditionally describe a deepening of love,
compassion, and understanding after the close of the experience, which, in turn, results in
increased caritas, or spiritual activity in service of the human world. For more on this topic,
and more specifically in Marfa’s writings, see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 282—283.
21. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 210.
22. See Rubial, La santidad controvertida, 86.
23. Even before it was published, Teresa’s Vida circulated in manuscript form
throughout Spanish convents and was widely influential. Mariana de San Joseph (Vida, 27)
writes of the influence Teresa’s work had on her before Teresa died. Mariana (Vida, 12)
also mentions reading St. Jerome’s letters, meditation books by Luis de Granada and Peter
of Alcantara, and Catherine of Siena’s letters, as well as Catherine’s life story written by
her confessor, Raymond da Capus. As a young girl, Mariana imitated the life depicted in
Catherine’s biography; later, as a mature woman writing about her own life, she imitated
its narrative format. For an excellent article on Catherine’s and other medieval women’s
biographies, see Coakley, "Friars as Confidants.”
24. Mariana de San Joseph, Vida de la Venerable M. Mariana de San Joseph. Some of Madre
Marfa’s visions also may have been influenced by reading the story of another Augustinian
Recollect, Isabel de Jesus (1586—1648), whose account reflects Augustinian devotion to
Christ, prayers for souls, and the concept of suffering entailing blood and tears; see Isabel
de Jesus, Vida de la venerable Madre Isabel de Jesus. In fact, the parallels between Marfa’s and
Rosa de Lima’s lives may have been filtered through the founder’s autobiography; they all
talk of mystic marriage, family conflict, extreme asceticism, union with Christ on the
cross, and prayers for souls in purgatory.
25. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 8.
26. Ibid., 9.
27. Ibid., 20, 15.
28. Ibid., 43.
29. Among others, these included Bishops Santa Cruz and Maldonado, as well as the
renowed Francisco de Vera. For a full list, see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 2-9.
30. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 6.
31. Other writers, such as Marfa de la Antigua and Teresa’s Carmelite companion Ana
de San Bartolome, recount sudden, miraculous abilities to read and write.
 Notes to Pages 82—gef. 225

32. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 53

33. Ibid., 16.
34. For a study of these different confessors, see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country,
316-324.
35. See Chicharro, Libro de la vida, 66—69, and Esposito, La mistica ciudad, 42.
36. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 75.
37. A good contrast to Santander y Torres is the Vida written by Sanchez y Castro
about another nun in Madre Marfa’s convent, Antonia de la Madre de Dios. In the four-
hundred-page biography, the author never cites more than one paragraph of Antonia’s own
writings per chapter. Of course, this may also reflect differing amounts written by the two
nuns. Antonia’s biographer never mentions the quantity of her accounts, and we do not
know if the originals are extant.
38. Both Coakley, “Friars as Confidants of Holy Women,” and Bynum, “The Female
Body and Religious Practice,” mention this difference between medieval men’s and
women’s views of women’s spiritual experiences.
39. Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 54—55.
40. Santander y Torres, Vida, 112.
41. Bishop Maldonado delivered a sermon in 1707 urging his congregation to support
Philip V’s monarchy. See Maldonado, Oracion evangelica, 15—26.
42. Marfa de San Jose, Estaciones que la Soberana Emperatriz de los Cielos Marta Santissima
Nuestra Senora anduvo y ensefio a la Venerable Madre Maria de San Joseph.
43. Santander y Torres, Oracion junebre.
44. See the bibliography for dates of the printings. The three oil portraits of Marfa de
San Jose include one currently on display at the Museum of the ex-Convent of Santa
Monica (reproduced in Muriel’s Retratos de monjas, plate 15), another at the Museum of the
ex-Convent of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, and a third at the Museo Nacional del
Virreinato, Tepozotlan (reproduced in Muriel’s Cultura femenina, plate 17). All three
portraits contain information about Marfa’s life, such as dates of birth (the Tepozotlan
portrait erroneously states that she was born May 4, 1656, which was probably the date of
her baptism) and entrance into the convent; her role as founder; and her secular name
(Palacios y Solorzano, which Muriel—probably due to the illegibility of the first letters of
the surname—erroneously transcribes from the Santa Monica portrait as Ygnacio y
Solorsano). The Santa Monica portrait also includes a poem about Marfa de San Jose’s
conversion experience.
45. See Gomez de la Parra, Fundacion y primer siglo, 456, and Sanchez y Castro, Vida de
Antonia de la Madre de Dios, 103.
46. My thanks go to the Reverenda Madre Priora Guillermina Sanchez for describing
the convent’s tradition.

Chapter 4

My thanks to Amanda Powell, Georgina Sabat-Rivers, and Nina M. Scott for their
valuable suggestions on this chapter.
1. Anne Bradstreet was the other colonial woman author who was published.
2. Translations for these two poems are from Trueblood’s A Sor Juana Anthology. The
first is from “Romance,” p. 92; the second is from “The Divine Narcissus,” p. 155.
3. Fernandez de Santa Cruz, “Prologue.” Translation from Trueblood, A Sor Juana, 202.
4. Trabulse in Carta de Serafimmotes the many changes introduced into the 1692 version.
5. For details about these early editions, see Sabat-Rivers’s introduction to her
edition of Inundacion castdlida.
226 Notes to Pages 94—98

6. For a full study of these final years of Sor Juana’s life, see Trabulse, “El silencio
final.’’ Alatorre and Tenorio debate some of Trabulse’s conclusions about the events in
Sor Juana’s final years in Serafina y Sor Juana, chap. 6 and appendix 2. For a more detailed
summary of this debate, see note 41 below.
7. See Brading, Orbe indiano, 405. Glantz (in Sor Juana, 58) describes an omnipresent
“yo”. Lavrin (“Sor Juana”) argues that this first-person narrative presence stems from the
amount of personal will in Sor Juana’s work (verus the conventional humble nun), and
Merrim (“Narciso,” in—117, “Toward a Feminist Reading,” 27) discusses Sor Juana’s
always strategic use of “yo.”
8. See Glantz, Sor Juana, chaps. 1—2, and Maza, Sor Juana ante la historia.
9. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. A companion volume of Sor Juana’s poetry
was also translated into English by Alan S. Trueblood.
10. For overviews of this history, see, for example, Buxo, “Prefacio” in Bravo Arriaga,
La excepcidn, 9—23; Merrim, introduction to Early Modern Women; and Poot Herrera, “Sor
Juana y su mundo,” 1—32. The analysis of the themes of obedience and free will has
emerged in scholarship that examines both Sor Juana’s poetry and prose. See, for example,
Buxo, “Sor Juana”; Sabat-Rivers, “Loa del auto”; Wissmer, Las sombras; Glantz, Sor Juana;
and Lavrin, “Sor Juana.”
11. For an overview of the documents that have been found since 1968 and a study of
their significance in interpreting Sor Juana’s life, see Poot Herrera, Los guardaditos, 307—332.
12. As Sabat-Rivers (En busca de Sor Jeana) has noted, Sor Juana was clearly familiar with
the most popular model for the feminine vida, Teresa of Avila’s Libro de su vida. Be'nassy-
Berling, Humanismo y religion, Franco, Plotting Women, Glantz, Sor Juana, Merrim, Early Modern
and Powell “Making Use;” all note this same parallel. See also Myers, “Sor Juana’s
Respuesta,” on the topic; this chapter builds on and revises that article.
13. Scholars are debating the authorship of a relatively recently found letter, Carta de
Serafina de Cristo (1691). Trabulse maintains that it is penned by Sor Juana; see his introduc¬
tion to Carta de Serafina.
14. The family members were small landholders on the Hacienda San Miguel de
Nepantla, southeast of Mexico City. It is important to note that Sor Juana’s birth year was
earlier established as 1651, but it was revised by most scholars in the 1980s when a
baptismal record was found. Several scholars still maintain that Sor Juana was bom in 1651.
Such contradictions in documents about birth years and ages is frequent in colonial
records. For example, we have several different birth years recorded for two other women
studied in this book: Marfa de San Jose and Catalina de Erauso.
15. See Quijada and Bustamante, “Las mujeres.”
16. Recall that Marfa de San Jose’s brother and sister had moved from the hacienda to
relatives’ houses in Puebla for similar reasons.
17. “Que a la manera que un Galeon real se defenderfa de pocas chalupas, que le
embistieran, asf se desembarazaba Juana Ines de las preguntas, argumentos, y re'plicas, que
tantos, cada uno en su clase, la propusieron” (as quoted in Glantz, Sor Juana, 180).
18. Fernandez de Santa Cruz, Regia. In fact, this rule was first written for the Hierony-
mite convent in Puebla, in which Marfa de San Jose’s sister, Francisca de la Encarnacion,
had professed her vows.
19. For a study of Sor Juana s reading, see Benassy-Berling, Humanismo y religion, part 2,
chap. 1.
20. Turning convention on its head, for example, Sor Juana queries the logic of a
coral-lipped woman: “Digo, pues, que el coral entre los labios/ se estaba con la grana en
los labios/ y las perlas, con nftidos orientes,/ andaban ensenandose a ser dientes; y alegaba
 Notes to Pages 98—101 227

la concha, no muy loca,/ que si ellas dientes son, ella es la boca.” Sor Juana jokes about
the worn-out poetic conventions for describing women as an ideal: “Es, pues, Lisarda; es,
pues ... Ay Dios, que aprieto.1/ No se quien es Lisarda, les prometo;/ que mi atencion
sencilla,/ pintarla prometio, no definilla./ Digo, pues... Oh que pueses tan soeces!/ Todo
el papel he de llenar de pueses. Jesus, que' mal empiezo!” (“El Pintar Lisarda la belleza,”
Ovillejos, 214, in Johnson 67, trans). See also Johnson, Satire, 66-73; Rabin, “Mito
petrarquista”; and Sabat-Rivers, En busca, 57-78.
21. Y solo se que mi cuerpo,/sin que a uno u otro se incline,/es neutro, o abstracto,
cuanto solo el alma desposite.” “Romance,” 48 (translated by Trueblood, A Sor Juana
Anthology, 31).
22. For a variety of studies on Nunez, see Bravo Arriaga, La excepcion.
23. “Por el [voto] de obediencia [sacrifica] su propia voluntad, albedrfo y toda su
alma” (quoted in Glantz, Sor Juana, 55).
24. Sor Juana reminds Nunez in her letter to him that he did not pay the dowry;
Nunez’s biographer Oviedo, however, asserts that he did.
25. For a history and study of this manuscript, see Scott, “If You Are Not Pleased,”
and Alatorre, “La carta.”
26. All translations of the Carta al Padre Nunez are from Scott, Madres del verbo, 71—82. “^Qual
era el dominio directo que tenia V.R. para disponer de mi persona y del alvedrfo (sacando el
que mi amor le daba y le dara siempre) que Dios me dio?” (Scott, Madres del verbo, 77).
27. “Santos solo la gracia y auxilios de Dios saven hacerlos” (ibid.).
28. “Dios que me crio y redimio, y que usa conmigo tantas misericordias, provehera
con remedio para mi alma, que esperjo] en su vondad no se perdera aunque le falte la
direccion de V.R., que a el cielo hacen muchas llaves, y no se estrecho a un solo dictamen,
sino que ay en el infinidad de manciones para diversos genios... ;Que' precision ay en que
esta salvacion mfa sea por medio de V.R.: ^No podra ser por otro? {Restringiose y
limitose la misericordia de Dios a un hombre...?” (ibid., 79).
29. Demitrious, as cited in Trueba Lawand, El arte, 23.
30. “La cristiandad se habfa introducido al mundo bajo la forma epistolar. La
importancia de las epfstolas de San Pablo... no puede ser exagerada. La religion de Jesus
habfa acentuado el sentido de la persona o circunstancia individuales al enfatizar la
relacion unica y privada del alma humana con su Creador. Ademas, el desarrollo de la
teologfa cristiana habfa exigido de los Padres una exposicion clara y estrecha de punto de
vista por medio del refinamiento de creencias ortodoxas y el combate contra opmiones
hereticas. No es sin razon que Gregorio Nacianceno, Gregorio de Nisa, Basilio, y
Crisostomo se incorparan en un canon cristiano de epistolograffa y son citados frecuente-
mente por retoricos de siglos posteriores junto con sus predecesores paganos” (George
Kustas, as quoted in Trueba Lawand, El arte, 18).
31. Even the Jesuits had a treatise that was widely used in their curriculum; see Trueba
Lawand, El arte, chap. 6.
32. See Trueba Lawand, El arte, 109, 119.
33. For a study of Nunez’s Cartilla and Santa Cruz’s letters published by Miguel de
Torres in his biography of the bishop, see Bravo Arriaga, La exception, 55-63 and ioi-m.
34. See Lavrin, “Sor Juana,” 605—622.
35. See Juana Ines de la Cruz, Obras, 813—814.
36. "Vuelvo a poner todo lo dicho debajo de la censura de nuestra Santa Madre Iglesia
Catolica, como su mas obediente hija” (ibid., 827).
37. Rebelo Gomes in “Para una nueva lectura” convincingly argues that the title may
have a double meaning: it may refer to Athenagoras rather than Athena. It is also worthy
228 Notes to Pages loi—ioi

of note that when this letter was republished in her second volume of collected works, it
was retitled as Crisis sobre un sermon (1692); we do not know if this was Sor Juana’s original
title for the letter, or if it was imposed later by the publisher. My thanks to Georgina
Sabat-Rivers for pointing this out to me.
38. “Toda la profesion religiosa consiste en no quitarle a Dios cosa alguna de lo
mesmo que le dio, porque quie'n hay que quite a Dios lo que ya le tiene dado?” (Fernandez
de Santa Cruz, Regia, as quoted in Glantz, Sor Juana, 77).
39. According to a study by Trabulse, Nunez had just published a small pamphlet,
Comulgador penitente (Puebla 1690), in which he corroborates Vieira’s sermon and further
elaborated on the theory of Christ’s finezas, arguing that Christ’s greatest gift was his
embodiment in the form of the Eucharist. To attack and correct Vieira, then, was to
attack and correct the influential Nunez (Trabulse, “El silencio final,” 11). Alatorre and
Tenorio dispute this reading of the Comulgador in their Serafim y Sor Juana, 77—83.
40. For more on the general dynamic, see, for example, Benassy-Berling, “Mas sobre la
conversion”; Bravo Arriaga, “Sobre dos” in La excepcion; and Trabulse, “El silencio.”
41. A second letter, Carta de Serafina de Cristo, written soon after the Carta atenagorica, but
before the Respuesta, may provide a partial key to the polemic. Trabulse argues in his study
and transcription and discussion of this letter that it was written by Sor Juana and
addressed to Bishop Santa Cruz: in it she reveals that Nunez had been the target of her
previous letter, not his Portuguese predecessor Vieira; the letter talks of the Castilian (not
Portuguese) soldier (Jesuits were the “soldiers of Christ”). See Trabulse’s transcription
and study, Carta de Serafina de Cristo, i6gi (1996).
Recent scholarship, however, has questioned the authenticity of this letter. Alatorre
and Tenorio’s recent book, Serafina y Sor Juana, refutes Trabulse’s findings and argues that
the Carta de Sefina may not be written by Sor Juana but by Castareha Urstia, the publisher
of Fama y obras postbumas. Their arguments about the authenticity of the document (as being
an autograph manuscript by Sor Juana) are convincing, but other aspects of their book
ignore certain parts of Trabulse’s thesis. Poot Herrera (Los guardaditos, 326—327) argues in a
more measured manner that while Sor Juana may not have been the “material author” of
the Carta de Serafina, she was the “intellectual author:” the letter reflects Sor Juana’s
arguments and was produced in her convent. The complexity and authenticity of the letter
is still unfolding, particularly with Poot Herrera’s (Los guardaditos) recent archival searches
in which she has traced other players involved in the polemic. After this chapter went to
press, I discovered that Trabulse had published another book, La muerte de Sor Juana (1999)
in which he revises and expands on his earlier studies.
42. Addressed to Bishop Santa Cruz, the letter uses his own female pseudonym with
which he signed the prologue to the Carta atenagorica, “Sor Filotea,” which, in turn, was
probably taken from St. Francis de Sales’s popular guide for nuns.
43. The Respuesta has been most frequently studied for clues to Sor Juana’s psyche and
poetic production and, more recently, for its dialogue with church rules and history,
dealing in particular with themes of obedience and institutional hierarchy. Some scholars
have extended this idea of dialogue to the highly intertextual nature of the Respuesta,
highlighting Sor Juana’s careful rewriting of authors mentioned. Scott (“La gran turba”)
for example, examines the catalogue of women included, while Luciam (“Anecdotal Self-
Invention ) argues that the anecdotes included in her self-portrait are highly metaphorical
and emblematic in their rewriting of St. Paul’s letters and Aristotelean theory. See also the
studies on obedience and free will by Sabat-Rivers, “En busca de Sor Juana (309-332)”;
Wissmer, Las sombras; Glantz, Sor Juana; Lavrin, “Sor Juana”; and Powell, “Making Use of
the Holy Office.”
 Notes to Pages toi—toj 229

44. Perelmuter, “La estructura,” 152.

45. All translations of the Respuesta are from Arenal and Powell, The Answer /La respuesta,
38—105. ^Por ventura soy mas que una pobre monja, la mas minima criatura del mundo y la
mas indigna de ocupar vuestra atencion?” (Arenal and Powell, The Answer /La Respuesta, 41).
46. Bendito seais vos, Senor, que no solo no quisisteis en manos de otra criatura el
juzgarme, y que ni aun en la mia lo pusisteis, sino que lo reservasteis a la vuestra” (ibid.).
47. “Dejen eso para quien lo entienda, que yo no quiero ruido con el Santo Oficio, que
soy ignorante” (ibid., 47).
48. “vuestra doctisima, discretisima, santisima y amorosisma carta” (ibid., 39).
49. ‘El escribir nunca ha sido dictamen propio, sino fuerza ajena, que les pudiera decir
con verdad: Vos me coegistis. Lo que si es verdad que no negare... que desde que me rayo la
primera luz de la razon, fue tan vehemente y poderosa la inclinacion a las letras, que ni
ajenas reprensiones —que he tenido muchas— ni propias reflejas —que he hecho no
pocas— han bastado a que deje de seguir este natural impulso que Dios puso en mr. Su Majestad
sabe por que y para que” (ibid.).
50. This reference is found much earlier in 2 Corinthians 12:11.
51. “Sabe tambien Su Majestad que no consiguiendo esto, he intentado sepultar con
mi nombre mi entendimiento, y sacrificarsele solo a quien me le dio; y que no otro motivo
me entro en religion” (Arenal and Powell, The Answer/La respuesta, 47).
52. “Prosiguiendo en la narracion de mi inclinasion, de que os quiero dar entera
notica” (ibid., 48).
53. “Y en fin, como el Libro que comprende todos los libros, y la Ciencia en que se
incluyen todas las ciencias, para cuya inteligencia todas sirven; y despues de saberlas todas
(que ya se ve que no es facil, ni aun posible), pide otra circunstancia mas que todo lo
dicho, que es una continua oracion y pureza de vida, para impetrar de Dios aquella
purgacion de animo e iluminacion de mente que es menester para la inteligencia de cosas
tan altas, y si esto falta, nada sirve de lo demas” (ibid., 55—57).
54. “Todas las cosas salen de dios que es el centro a un tiempo y la circunferencia de
donde salen y donde paran todas las lineas criadas” (ibid., 59).
55. “Ya se ve cuan duro es estudiar en aquellos caracteres sin alma, careciendo de la
voz viva y explicacion del maestro; pues todo este trabajo sufrfa yo muy gustosa por amor
de las letras” (ibid., 55).
56. “En todo lo dicho, venerable senora, no quiero .. .decir que me han perseguido por
saber, sino solo porque he tenido amor a la sabidurfa y a las letras, no porque haya
conseguido ni uno ni otro” (ibid., 71).
57. See ibid., 60—71.
58. Ibid., 75.
59. “Si Aristoteles hubiera guisado, mucho mas hubiera escrito” (ibid., 75).
60. “Y as! remito la decision a ese soberano talento, sometiendome luego a lo que
sentenciare, sin contradiccion ni repunancia” (ibid., 77).
61. “Veo aquella egipdaca Catarina, leyendo y convenciendo todas las sabidurfas de
los sabios de Egipto. Veo una Gertrudis leer, escribir y ensenar” (ibid., 79).
62. “,;C6mo vemos que la Iglesia ha permitido que escriba una Gertrudis, una Teresa,
una Brfgida, la monja de Agreda y otras muchas?... y ahora vemos que la Iglesia permite
escribir a las mujeres santas y no santas, pues la de Agreda y Marfa de la Antigua no estan
canonizadas y corren sus escritos; y ni cuando Santa Teresa y las demas escribieron, lo
estaban” (ibid., 91).
63. “Tales fueron las Divinas Letras en poder del malvado... Lutero y de los demas
heresiarcas... a los cuales hizo dano la sabidurfa” (ibid., 83).
2)0 Notes to Pages toy—no

64. “;Oh cuanto danos se excusaran en nuestra republica si las ancianas fueran doctas como
Leta y que supieran ensenar como manda San Pablo y mi Padre San Jeronimo!” (ibid., 85).
65. For more on this debate in the context of Sor Juana’s work, see Arenal and Powell,
The Answer /La respuesta, 254—256, and Merrim, Early Modern Women, introduction.
66. “Y protesto que solo lo hago por obedeceros; con tanto recelo, que me debe’is mas
en tomar la pluma con este temor... Pero, bien que va a vuestra correccion; borradlo,
rompedlo y reprendedme” (Arenal and Powell, The Answer /La respuesta, 83).
67. “Si el crimen esta en la Carta Atenagorica, fue aquella mas que referir sencil-
lamente mi sentir... Si es, como dice el censor, heretica, por que no la delata? Y con eso el
quedara vengado y yo contenta,... pues como yo fui libre para disentir de Vieira, lo sera
cualquiera para disentir de mi dictamen” (ibid., 93).
68. “^Pero, donde voy, Senora mfa? Que esto no es de aqui,... insensiblemente se
deslizo la pluma” (ibid.).
69. “Que no solo es llcito, pero utilfsimo y necesario a las mujeres el estudio de las
sagradas letras, y mucho mas a las monjas” (ibid.).
70. "Confieso desde luego mi ruindad y vileza”; “yo nunca he escrito cosa alguna por
mi voluntad, sino por ruegos y preceptos ajenos”; “los torpes borrones de mi ignorancia”
(ibid., 97—103).
71. Victor, victor Catarina,
que con su ciencia divina
los sabios ha convencido,
y victoriosa ha salido
—con su ciencia soberana—
de la arrogancia profana
que a convencerla ha venido!
victor, victor, victor!
. .. Nunca de varon ilustre
triunfo igual habemos visto;
y es que quiso Dios en ella
honrar el sexo femenino.
Victor, victor!
... Tutelar sacra Patrona, es de las Letras Asilo;
porque siempre ilustre Sabios,
quien Santos de Sabios hizo.
Victor, victor!
(From Villancicos a Santa Catarina, trans. Arenal and Powell, The Answer/La respuesta, 161-162)
72. As calficador, Nunez de Miranda wrote an “Aprobacion” to Pedro de la Vega’s life
of Catherine: La rosa de Alexandria entre/lores bumanas y divinas letras, Sta Catalina, Virgen, Regia,
Doctora, Ilustre martyr, virtudes de su vida, triunfo de su muerte, 1671. In the license he praises St.
Catherine’s erudition.
73. See Trabulse’s “El silencio final,” 13.
74. The Enigmas were rediscovered in 1968. Apparently the title page was published, but
the text was not; it had been blocked from publication by the archbishop of Mexico. See
Alatorre, Sor Juana, and Trabulse, “El silencio,” 13. Poot Herrera (Los guardaditos, 343) also
discusses the content of a series of romances written during these same years and argues
that they provide further evidence of Sor Juana’s continued literary activity.
75. As Trabulse’s careful chronology elucidates, within weeks of the publication of the
Carta Atenagorica, Palavicino had preached a sermon, Lafineza mayor (January 1691) in Sor
 Notes to Pages UO—ua 231

Juanas own convent. He declared Sor Juana a wise “monja teologa.” Within the month
the Inquisition blocked the publication of Palavicino’s sermon, and Sor Juana wrote her
Respuesta. By April 1691, the case against Palavicino was dropped, but it was reinitiated
about a year later, coinciding with the probable initiation of a proceso espicopal secreto against
Sor Juana (1693) (Trabulse, El silencio final,” 12). Within days of Palavicino’s sermon,
someone in Sor Juana’s camp wrote the Carta de Serajina de Cristo.
76. Poot Herrera (Los guardaditos, 332) mentions a document and study that reveals that
Nunez was “a censured censor.”
77. Ibid.
78. “Abjurar de sus errores, a confesarse culpable, a desagraviar a la Purisima Concepcion,
a no publicar mas y a ceder su biblioteca y sus bienes al arzobispo” (as quoted in Trabulse
“El silencio final,” 13). It is important to note that Sor Juana did not take issue with the
dogma of the Holy Conception here but, rather, to ideas put forth by Nunez and his
followers.
79. There were 185 books and 15 manuscript legajos (Trabulse, "El silencio final”). See
also Poot Herrera, Los guardaditos, 329. “Las monjas,” a study by Rubial, reveals that Sor
Juana continued to be active in the financial world of the convent as well.
80. See Trabulse, “El silencio final,” 12—13.
81. Ibid., 15.
82. “La vida de esta rara Muger, que nacio en el Mundo a justificar a la naturaleza las
vanidades de prodigiosa” (Calleja, “Aprobacion,” in Fama y obras, unnumbered preliminary
pages).
83. “Quien a las objeciones de los que passan la simple aprehension por juizio
hecho, quisiere ver vna cabal satisfacion... alii vera, que la Madre Juana Ynes no
destino este escrito para notorio... Alii vera, que con la satisfacion, que da la Poetisa al
Padre Vieira, queda mas ilustrado, que con la defensa que le hizo quien lavo con tinta la
nieve. Y alii finalmente vera en esta Muger admirable vna humildad de candidez tan
mesurada, que no rehusa dar satisfaciones de su misma ofensa” (Calleja, “Aprobacion,”
Fama').
84. Oviedo, Vida exemplar.
85. “Tan lejos esta senora de amar o desear estos favores de Dios extraordinarios, que
temblaba y se horrorizaba solo con su memoria; alii por juzgarse indigna e incapaz de
todos ellos; como por temer el riesgo y peligro que ocasionan, y de que han sido ejemplo
espantoso tantos Icaros... suplicaba mstantemente a dios, que la librase de ese camino la
llevase solo por la segura senda del padecer, asistida de vivlsima fe, de firmisima esperanza
y de ardientfsma caridad” (as quoted in Glantz, Sor Juana, 97).
86. Glantz (Sor Juana, chap. 1 and page 121) notes many of these references to Sor Juana
during the colonial period.
87. "Y si por ser primero/ Colon, el que valiente/descubrio nuestros polos/ antes que
a ellos Americo viniese,/ se mando que estos orbes,/que en si tantos contiene,/ no
Ame'rica, como antes,/ sino solo Colonia se dijesen./ Con cuanta mas justicia,/ si a la
tuya atiende,/ desde hoy mudando nombre/ o Nisida o Nisea llamarse deben” (as quoted
in Glantz, Sor Juana, 34^1).
88. “Esta America Septentrional, tan celebrada por sus ricos minerales, puede gloriarse
de haber sido patria de una mujer tan heroica que podemos aplicarle el epfteto de la mujer
fuerte” (as quoted in ibid., 38).
89. For a study of these, see Sabat-Rivers, “Blanco, negro, rojo: Semiosis racial en los
villancicos.”
232 Notes to Pages 116—119

Chapter j
My thanks to Asuncion Lavrin for first introducing me to Ursula’s text and to Mary E.
Giles, Catherine Larson, and Kristin Routt for their valuable suggestions for this chapter.
My thanks also to Pascale Bonaforte and Rene Millar for their help in tracking down
archival materials in Santiago. This chapter is a greatly expanded and revised version of my
1990 article on Ursula Suarez “Miraba las cosas.” In particular, I examine the historical
context that may have been a key factor in the writing of the Relacion.
1. See Los empenos de una casa by Sor Juana, the character Castano, Act III.
2. “Vestia de monja al mulato del convento, llevandolo a los tornos y locutorio de
hombres, que tras mi entrase para que con algunos se endevotase; y con tal gracia lo hasla
que me finaba de risa, y mas cuando le pedfan la manita, y el mulato la sacaba llefia de
callos; y estaban ellos tan embelesados, que no reparaban en lo aspero y crecido. En fin,
ellos le daban sus realillos y cajetas de polvillo y era tan disparatado el mulato que, despues
de agarrada la plata, les dejaba las manos aranadas, habiendo estado con mil quiebros
hablando de chifillo; yo a su oido, hecha el enemigo. En estas cosas se ocupaba la
provisora [Ursula]: ojala no lo fuera, si habfa de ser tan perversa” (Suarez, Relacion, 161).
3. “Tengo de haser milagros, y han de pagarlos; ^habran visto santos ni santas
interesados?: yo he de ser esa, porque si sano enfermos o doy vista a siegos, han de venir a
servir al convento, y ustedes [las monjas] se llevaran el provecho; yo, el trabajo: que me
estaran atormentando, y tengo de ser una santa muy alegre” (ibid., 246).
4. “No he tenido una santa comedianta, y de todo hay en los palacios; tu has de ser la
comedianta” (ibid., 230).
5. “predicar como San Pablo” (ibid., 202).
6. As in the case of many of these texts, the original title is telling of its genric
origins; it echoes to a degree Teresa. Ursula’s title is: “Relacion de las singulares
misericordias que ha usado el Senor con una religiosa, indigna esposa suya, previniendole
siempre para que solo amase a tan Divino Esposo y apartase su amor de las criaturas;
mandada escrebir por su confesor y padre espiritual” (ibid., 89).
7. My dates are based on Ramon and Podesta’s informative preliminary study to the
Relacion, but my interpretation takes into account the important fact that only the first
eight notebooks are written as a vida, while four of the remaining six are written as discrete
narrative units and notebooks 13-14 are written as a single unit. For this reason, dates,
addressees, and—perhaps most importantly—narrative order are difficult to establish. In
fact, the editor changes the order of several notebooks from both the original autograph
manuscript held at the Archives of the Convento Santa Clara de la Victoria and the
nineteenth-century copy at the Archivo Nacional (Ramon, “Introduccion,” 17-22).
Ramon (ibid., 39-40) argues that the manuscript was written in four stages: 1708; ca. 1710—
1712; ca. 1726; and ca. 1730—1732.
8. A master’s thesis by Mac Keller, “La relacion autobiografica,” outlines the
contents of these notebooks, 18-22. My thanks to Rene Millar for providing me with a
copy of the thesis.
9. As in the case of most nuns’ writings, they were probably bound by Ursula herself
or one of her confessors.
10. Canovas, Ursula Suarz ; Montecmos, Identidad feminma”; Valdes, “Escntura
de monjas”; Lagos, “Confessing”; Routt, “Authorizing Orthodoxy” and Ibsen, Women’s.
11. Francisco and Maria were married around 1663; for a thorough study of the family,
see Ramon, “Introduccion,” 54—60.
12. Ursula’s grandmother had arranged for her son’s marriage and asked for Ursula’s
mother “desnuda”—that is, she needed no dowry, not even, as the autobiographer informs
 Notes to Pages ug—122 233

us, the clothing she wore or a bed to sleep on. For further historical detail, see Ramon,
Introduccion,”, 58-61. For more on marriages in colonial Chile, see Salinas Meza,
Uniones ilegftimas.” For a good general study of women in colonial Chile, see Salinas, Las
cbilenas, chap. 4. Salinas bases some of her conclusions about marriage and feminine
education in colonial Chile on Ursula’s account.
13. Ursula’s grandmother alone had five domestic slaves (Salmas, Las chilenas, 31).
14. Suarez, Relacion, 112, 232.
15. Ibid., 105. The “Aprobacion” to the biography of Marfa de San Jose, for example,
talks of the nun’s convents as “donde tantas Sagradas Virgines se desatan en olorosas
suavidad y se exhalan en fragantes humos” and “Viviente confeccion de Aromas”
(Santander y Torres, Vida, unnumbered preliminary pages).
16. “Si tomaba un libro era por entretenimiento y no para aprovecharme de ello; y los
buscaba de historias o cuentos, novelas o comedias... tambien lef en esos tiempos de
noviciado de la Escritura algo, y tambien vidas de santos, y en no siendo tragicas, las
dejaba” (Suarez, Relacion, 148—149).
17. “Fdise la intencion de no perder ocasion que no ejecutase enganar a cuantos
pudiese mi habilidad, y esto con un entero, como si hisiese Dios en el estado presente
servicio muy bueno” (ibid., 113—114).
18. For a history of the convent and role of Ursula’s grandfather, Alonso del Campo,
see Guernica, Historia, chaps. 1—2. The money was donated as early as 1629, but years of
conflict within the Franciscan order, economic concerns, and a major earthquake delayed
the founding for nearly half a century.
19. See Salinas, Las chilenas, 162.
20. See Ramon, “Introduccion,” 68.
21. Ibid., 56.
22. “No ha habido noviciado mas rfgido, porque tuvimos una maestra muy recta y de
condicion recia, la cual nos tenia debajo de Have todo el dla en una seldita que apenas
cablan las treinta novisias, porque no tenia la selda ni corral, ni huerta” (Suarez Relacion,
142).
23. Ramon, “Introduccion,” 41. A 1690 document records the sale of a house to Marfa
de Escobar (Ursula’s mother): “Una celda con su huertecita que estan los claustros de este
Monasterio, de ocho varas de frente y el largo desde dicho frente hasta topar con las
paredes de la casa que posee la viuda del Capitan D. Jorge Blander” (as quoted in
Guernica, Historia, 1x4).
24. Suarez, Relacion, 171.
25. Guernica, Historia, 214—217.
26. For a list of these men, see Ramon, “Introduccion,” 37 and 78.
27. For more on documentation dealing with Ursula’s profession, see Ramon,
“Introduccion,” 77—78.
28. Suarez, Relacion, 63, 239—241.
29. For a history of this conflict, see Guernica, Historia, 51—52.
30. “Fue el tenor de la sentencia que a dona Ursula Suares, porque alborotaba el
convento y perdfa el respeto y obediencia a las preladas, dando escandalos y causando
insendios a las relgiosas, quitandoles el habla porque no la habfan hecho abadesa y prelada,
por tantos delitos y levantamientos, mandaba su senorfa llustrfsima se me diese diciplina
de rueda; que junta toda la comumdad cada una me asotase, y luego besase los pies a todas
las religiosas, y comiese en tierra, y estuviera reclusa en mi selda, sin salir de ella; y esto se
ejecutase por nueve dfas, que asf lo habfa provefdo y mandado su ilustrfsima ante su
notario, y asf se habfa firmado” (Suarez, Relacion, 261).
234 Notes to Pages izz—tzy

31. Ibid., 270.

32. “Onse anos antes que me eligiesen de abadesa, me dijo su Majestad: Favo[re]sere’
tu convento si admites su gobierno’” (ibid., 239).
33. See note 7 for information on the chronology of composition. -n

34. As quoted in Ramon, “Introduccion,” 80.

35. Guernica’s history of the convent, for example, culls many of the convent records
and finds instances in which Ursula’s name is mentioned. On one occasion, it is because
she is sick and funds are allotted for buying her more food (Historia, 163). In another, she
signs off on a document dealing with a celda (Historia, 126). More detailed accounts about
her life are not mentioned by Guernica or Ramon.
36. Our only clue to Gamboa being the addressee of these eight notebooks is when
Ursula (Relation, 163) refers to Marla de Gamboa as “hermana de Vuestra Paternidad.” This
occurs in the middle of the vida sequence.
37. Ibid., 165, 166, 167, 169—170.
38. “Desla por las demas: ‘^Como podran tener oracion larga, que a ml luego se me
acaba?’ Daban todas risadas, disiendo: ‘^Como se le acaba?’; deslales: “Yo no lo entiendo
bien: lo tengo de memoria, pero con el no hago cosa;’ deslanme: ‘Divertirase en otras
cosas’; deslales: “no es eso, que el punto lo estoy disiendo’; relanse tambien desto. Mas no
dejaba de ira mi oracion a tiempos” (ibid., 166—167).
39. I owe a debt of gratitude to Kristine Ibsen and Kristin Routt for bringing to my
attention the connection between the comedia and the Relation. See Ibsen, Women’s, chap. 6,
and Routt, “Authoring Orthodoxy,” chap. 4.
40. Popular dramatists, such as Lope de Vega, set dozens of saints’ lives to dramatic form.
41. The mujer varonil was a constant favorite in Spanish theatre from 1590 to 1600, with
at least one new play produced each year. As McKendrick’s (Woman and Society, 43)
important study of women in Golden Age theatre notes, the mujer varonil represented a
woman who “ through inclination or through circumstance, departed from the feminine
norm of the society in which they lived, or which had, at least, nurtured them.” Moreover,
her revolt “is against Society and convention, and woman’s inferior position in them, not
against her sexual role vis-a-vis man” (Woman and Society, 317). Typically this rebellion was
considered virtuous because the woman aspired to transcend the limitations of her sex. For
more on this argument, see Ibsen, Women’s, 122—130.
42. Weber studies Teresa’s writings in Teresa, 128—134; Ross points to Sigiienza y
Gongora’s use of this structure in The Baroque Narrative, chap. 4; Johnson mentions several
elements in Sor Juana’s Respuesta in Satire, 76—87; and Sanchez Lora examines a variety of
religious women’s life stories in Mujeres, 351—357, 404—405.
43. Rabell, “La confesion,” 20.
44. Interestingly, after writing his picaresque novel, Aleman went on to write two
hagiographic biographies—one on Saint Anthony of Padua and one on the archbishop of
Mexico.
45. Howard Mancing brought to my attention another case in which the picara clearly
deviates from a nun’s confession. The anonymons seventeenth-century Vida y costumhres de la
Madre Andrea recounts the life of woman who is a madre only by title, not profession. In
fact, she is the antithesis of a model nun.
46. Friedman elaborates this idea in "The Picaresque as Autobiography: Story and
History,” 119—128.
47. Ramirez Leyva (Maria Rita Vargas, 39), for example, links beatas and ptcaras, with both
generally pertaining to the lower class. See also Huerga, “La picaresca de las beatas,” and
Perry, Gender and Disorder.
 Notes to Pages tzj—izy 235

48. Suarez, Relacion, 91. There is an echo here of the picaresque as well: the picaro moves
from one master (amo) to another.
49. Ibid., 98.
50. En una ocasion se empeso [mi madre] a lamentar que no tenia con que poder
trabajar, y que mi abuela, teniendo tanto trigo, no le daba una fanega, y a mi me dijo:
Dirasle, piquito, para que diga tu abuela que la murmuro y que soy nuera.’ Yo busque'
ocasion de desirlo a mi abuela, porque aunque era tan chiquilla, que ni sinco anos tenia,
miraba las cosas que desia; y un dia que en la cama me tenia, le dije: ‘Abuelita, la pobre de
mi mama no tiene con que trabajar: {por que vuestra mersed no le da?’; respondio: ‘{No
tiene tres negras esclavas?: {por que no las hase trabajar?: {como las envia alquilar?: y le he
dicho que [s]e han de enfermar con los alquileres, y tu madre no quiere’. Asi hablaba
conmigo como si yo fuera gente. Dijele: ‘Dele trigo, y con eso hara sus amasijos’. ‘{Ella te
lo dijo?’ ‘Mi mama habla conmigo —le respond! yo—; dele el trigo'... Yo empese a llorar
y a darle quejas, disiendo: ‘{Ve como no me quiere abuela?: {esas son sus finesas, no
quererme dar la llave de la espensa?’ Tantas bachillerias le desia, que dijo: ‘Toma la Have,
nina; da dos fanegas’. Fui a mi madre muy contenta; dijele: ‘Vamos a la espensa, que ya le
da trigo mi abuela’. ‘{No te dije que no se lo dijeras?; hay desvergiiensa; {par que se lo
contastes a tu abuela?: que delante de ti no se puede hablar’. Yo empese' a temblar,
jusgando me habia de asotar. Entonses le dijo mi tia: ‘No seas asi, Marucha, con tu hija:
sobre buscarte la vida y con que poder trabajar, hase'is a este angelito temblar, en ves que la
habias de halagar. No seas necia con ella, que es tan donosa y descreta’” (ibid.).
51. Ibid., 94—95.
52. “Seraslo [monja] con toda comodidad, si Dios me quisiere guardar hasta que tu
tengas edad, que no habra monja de mas comodidad, con tu selda alhajada, muy bien
colgada, escaparate y tu plata labrada, que del Peru se traera, y los liensos del Cusco, y
todo lo nesesario a Lima enviare emplearlo. Tendras tu esclava dentro y otra fuera, y
cuatro mil pesos de renta; esto fuera de tu herencia, que de por si te la daran” (ibid., 101).
53. Ibid., 119,104. “Se me ponia en la cabesa que todas las que se casaban estaban
muertas” (ibid., 126).
54. “{Pues, yo habia de consentir que con hombre me acostasen?: primero he de
horcarme, o con una daga degollarme, o el pecho atravesarme” (ibid., 123—124).
55. For a study of the folkloric elements in Suarez’s Relacion, see Canovas, “Ursula
Suarez,” 100. As Ramon (“Introduction,” 76) notes, this incident probably plays on the
confusion of a child who knows the Chilean tradition of displaying the marriage bed at
weddings.
56. “Habia oido contar de una varilla de virtud, que con ella se hasian maravillas.
Creialas, y asi buscaba esta varilla con ansias: salia de casa y seguiame por una sequia que
sale de las monjas agustinas, y llegaba tan abajo donde la sequia se batia, que tiraba a la
campana... Habian unos cuartos vasios y sin puertas, donde se cometian tantas desver-
giiensas que era temeridad esta, siendo de dia, y no solas dos personas habian en esta
maldad, sino 8 6 10; y esto no habia ojos que lo viesen, sino los de una inosente, que no
sabia si pecado cometian. Yo pensaba eran casamientos, y asi todos los dias iba a verlos”
(Suarez, Relacion, 107—108).
57. “Yo le desia [a mi tia]: ‘Cuando grandesilla sere la rosa entre las espinas, que he de
ser monjita’; ella me desia: '{Vos habias de ser monja?: tan perversa y de tan mala casta,
enemigos de ser monjas’ y le respondia yo: ‘Yo, tia, he de ser la corona de la generacion’;
desiame: ‘Calla, loca, que tu vivesa no es para monja, aunque de chiquitita en mantillas te
estaba banando un dia en medio del patio, y me causastes espanto, porque, teme'ndote en
cueritos... agarrada de las trensas de mis cabellos empesastes a repicar con gran compas, y
236 Notes to Pages 128—130

hasias el tanido de las campanas con la boca.’ Yo, espantada, llame' a tu madre y le dije:
‘Gata, ven a ver a tu hija, que ha de ser monja: mira como repica’. Mi madre y todas las de
la casa salieron a selebrar tu gracia: no se que sera, porque tu eres gran bellaca’. Yo le
desia: ‘Tfa, vuestra mersed lo vera como soy monja’” (ibid., 91—92).
58. For an excellent analysis of this topic in Suarez, see Routt, “Authorizing Ortho¬
doxy,” chap. 4.
59. Suarez, Relacion, 181.
60. See Rabell, “La confesion.”
61. “En conclusion, hise la mtencion de no perder ocasion que no ejecutase engahar a
cuantos pudiese mi habilidad, y esto con un entero, como si hisiese a Dios en el estado
presente servicio muy bueno; no se pasarfan cuatro dfas que no ejecute mi intento”
(Suarez, Relacion, 113—114).
62. “Despues de completas, pareciome buena ocasion esta para poder enganar. Fui a la
caja de mi da; como mica empe'seme [a] alinar con mucho afan, y desia: ‘Cuando suben a
la ventana van alinadas’. Saque el soliman y sin espejo me lo empese a pegar, y muy buena
color; no se si me puse como mascaron: a esto no atendia yo, sino al alino que a las
mujeres habia visto... y saque una mantilla... que me tapara la cara: bien lo discurrfa, que
viesen que era blanca y no conosiesen era nina. Fuime asi a la ventana... Yo que estoy ya
sentada, vi venir un hombre de hasia la plasa y dije: ‘Gracias a Dios, ahora te engano a vos’.
Asi susedio, que el hombre se llego a la ventana y me empeso [a] hablar. Ni yo sabia lo que
e[l] hombre me desia ni lo que yo le respondia . . . pediame la mano; yo hise reparo que si
me la veia habia de conoser por ella que era nina. Saco un punado de plata y me la daba; y
porque no me viera la mano me acobaraba, no porque me alboroto la plata. Por ultimo
dijele: ‘Si me da la plata, entre la mano en la ventana’; yo todo lo hasia por asegurarla y
arrebatarsela; entro el punado de plata como se lo mandaba y doyle una manotada
dejandome juntamente caer de la ventana, con un patacon que solo le pude arrebatar,
que no cupo en mi mano mas. Y asi que estuve abajo, lo empese' a llamar de caballo,
disie'ndolo: ‘Te [he] enganado, tontaso; tan mal animal que de mi se dejo enganar’... Serre
la ventana de presto y fuime dentro a guardar los aseos y lavarme la cara porque no me
viese mi tia afeitada” (ibid., 114—115).
63. Ibid., 115, 127, 134.
64. “Selebraban la gracia y desian que debia de ser gran bellaca y resabida”
(ibid., 141).
65. “Yo estuve disgustada de principio en el convento, echando menos los aseos de mi
casa y el no comer en plata labrada” (ibid., 140).
66. Criticism of the devoto system was broadly based: Teresa of Avila attacked it, and
picaresque novelists such as Quevedo and Aleman criticized it. For more information on
the practice, see Ramon, “Introduccion,” 71—72, and Perry’s discussion of devotos and satire
in Gender and Disorder, 8oni8.
67- Yo digo que, como le daba, no solo gran religiosa me pronosdcaba sino santa,
porque este dar era cono[n]isar” (Suarez, Relacion, 142).
68. “Llegaba el tiempo de confesarme y hasia esamen de tantas maldiciones” (ibid., 165).
69. “Pues este hombre, ^no era un necio, que a tales disparates daba credito?; pues
jhabia de irme con hombre casado, ya que salia del convento, y mas teniendo el conosi-
miento de mis parientes y quien era?: suya fue la simplesa en creeerme, cuando desia que yo
paresia perversisima, que tenia trasa de al diablo enganarlo: ellos mesmos lo desian, y
ensima les caia; con que ahora pienso que los diablos para las mujeres son ellos que han
sido los enganados” (ibid., 186—187).
 Notes to Pages 130—134. 237

70. Ibid., 192—200. Yo puse en vos las palabras de san Pablo, porque quiero prediques
como el (ibid., 203). Ursula s first discussion of St. Paul and theology is couched between
two accounts of prayer (ibid., 186—189).
71. [Padre Vinas] dijome no dije[se] lo que dijo san Pablo, sino lo que Samuel,
tambien las palabr[a]s de la Virgen Sanrfsima: Ece ancila; yo, como no sabfa, desfa lo que se
me ofrecfa... y par[e]se que esto [n]o salfa de mi alma, sino que con la boca solo lo
hablaba; yo lo desia porque el padre lo habfa mandado, no con la eficasia que habfa dicho
las de san Pablo, porque estas las digto mi corason. En otra ocasion... me dijo esta vos en
el interior: ‘Yo quiero manifestar la fuersa de mi poder en vos’” (ibid., 200).
72. Ibid., 214—216, 209, 212, 196.
73. These notebooks open and close with clearly marked narrative formula.
74. For more on composition of the notebooks see Podesta, “Editor’s note to Relation,”
17—22, and Ramon, “Introduccion,” 37—43.
75. For studies of language and its role in the picaresque novel, see Friedman, The
Antiheroine’s Voice.
76. This confusion, as we saw in the chapter on Catarina de San Juan, may reflect the
fact that all people of Asian descent were called “chinos.”
77. Suarez, Relation, 218—220, 231. “Pregunte'les por que' no estaban bautisados antes;
dijeron no sabfan resar: ‘Vos —me dijeron— ensehastes a nosotros.’ Yo me ref de su
tonterfa de desir que no habfan podido aprender con los padres, smo de mf” (ibid., 232).
78. “Soy tan habladora que me buscaban las religiosas que las divertiera, y me
Uamaban la historiadora” (ibid., 245).
79. “[El obispo] padesfa de hipocondrfa; yo, por divertfrsela, le desfa bufonadas y hasfa
dar risadas:... se divertfa de mis frioneras” (ibid., 243).
80. “Dile al obispo que el haberte dado el pie no le paresca fue acaso, sino para que te
de' la mano, que hartos tiempos te han hollado, y como trigo acribado, que trese anos has
estado en el lago, que te de' la mano y que se acuerde bien si ha dado el pie [a] alguna
mujer, que para ti lo guarde y para eso lo consagre” (ibid., 244).
81. “Dfjome mi Senor y Padre amantfsimo: ‘No he tenido una santa comedianta, y de
todo hay en los palacios; tu has de ser la comedianta’; yo le dije: ‘Padre y Senor mfo, a mas
de tus beneficios y misericordias, te agradesco, que ya que quieres haserme santa, no sea
santa friona’: dfjome: ‘Ya no envidiaras a dona Marina y a la Antigua’” (ibid., 230). For a
more complete identification of these two women, see Ramon, “Introduccion,” 34.
82. “Han de saber que he de ser santa, y no asf como quiera, que no ha de haber en la
Iglesia de Dios santa tan disparatada” (Suarez, Relation, 245).
83. Significantly, men who are not portrayed in this light are depicted as effeminate.
The loving father is called a pansy (marica) by his wife, and one kind devoto is portrayed as
both mother and father to Ursula.
84. Canovas (“Ursula Suarez,” 114) keenly observes that Ursula’s account is “un
testimonio que reorienta (o cuestiona) la literatura edificante de la epoca.” He suggests that
she reorients it by including “la voz tradicional (el folklore), de raigambre hispanica” and a
feminine voice. He does not, however, posit a convincing argument to explain why Ursula
would question didactic literature. As Routt (“Authorizing Orthodoxy,” chap. 4) explains,
Ursula flaunts her own voice—whether in dialogue with God, making jokes, or teaching. She
rejects the serious, silent, self-mortifying saintly paradigm and offers a new role.
85. See Cruz, “The Picaresque as Discourse of Poverty,” 90.
86. The dream is told to Padre Vinas, who died in 1719, so it took place sometime
before that.
238 Notes to Pages 134—136

87. See a parallel symbolism of a dove and serpent in Santander y Torres, “Apro-
bacion,” Vida.
88. “Cuando referf esto al padre Vinas, me dijo: ‘Y no tiene giiesos’; yo le dije: ‘Si se lo
of sonar.’ ‘No tiene giiesos,’ volvio a replicar. Yo calle y no le pugne mas” (Suarez, Relation,
270).
89. “Dfjome su Majestad: ‘Repique ha de haber,’ yo le dije: ‘Y truenos tambien, para
que este buena la fiesta’” (ibid., 263).
90. “No me hables en latfn ni me nombres a san Pablo ni me tomes en la boca la
Biblia” (ibid., 262).
91. “Viendo tantas misericordias como de su inmensa bondad resebfa, le dije: ‘Senor y
dueno de todo mi ser, mi solo amor y todo mi bien, parese quieres haser verdaderas mis
locuras’; respondio: ‘Profetisabas en ti’; dfjele: ‘Yo profeta en mi tierra?’; dfjome: ‘Contigo
todo se dispensa’; dfjele: ‘Y cuando tengo de ser santa?’; respondio: ‘Cuando estes callada’;
dfjele: ‘Mucho me falta, que no puedo estar callada’” (ibid., 245).
92. Recall that Marfa de San Jose's notebooks are carefully reordered and do not
follow the chronology of composition; her Stations were recopied and circulated in
manuscript form during her own life. Both were used later for the hagiographic vida. In
Ursula’s case, the opening title and chapter heading are clearly in a formal hand, and talks
of Ursula are in third person: “Relacion de las singulares misericordias que ha usado el
Senor con una religiosa, indigna esposa suya, previniendole siempre para que solo amase a
tan Divino Esposo y apartase su amor de las ciraturas; mandaba escrebir por su confesor y
padre espiritual.” The main body of the text is in a less careful hand, typical of many nuns’
handwriting. Besides the paleography, the theory that the notebooks might be in Ursula’s
original hand is convincing, since there are blank pages in the manuscript that would
typically not be in a manuscript copy.
93. There surely were written works after that date, as Abbess Ursula wrote many
letters and Ramon conjectures that her extant notebooks probably represent a small
portion of what she actually wrote. There is some discrepancy about the order of
notebooks 10—13: they were composed as separate narrative units and have been ordered in
several ways. I believe that the twentieth-century edition has misplaced the twelfth
notebook, which contains a single anecdote about Ursula’s wimple. The editors placed it
in the middle of the chronological story about the 1711 election of the abbess (notebook
11), subsequent difficulties with the abbess and confessors (notebook 13), and the bishop’s
1715 sentencia (notebook 14). The nineteenth-century copy places the twelfth notebook
before this sequence (between notebooks 10 and n), and it seems less disruptive there. See
Podesta, “Editor’s note to Relacion,” 21.
94. Ibsen, for example, argues: “Like the mujer varonil, Ursula in the end is forced to
defer to male authority, although with a decidedly unhappy, if not tragic, ending. Ursula
Suarez’s decision to end her narration with a dream that predates the time of writing by at
least twelve years suggests the enormous pain of realization when this ‘very happy saint’
was forced by circumstances into silence” (Women’s, 136).
95. Ibsen (in Women’s, 134) discusses the role of a controversial Inquisition trial and
Romero’s transfer to Quito. In “Introduction,” 36-43, Ramon argues that later
notebooks were probably destroyed. My reading is based on the fact that in note¬
book 10 each of Ursula’s previous confessors, and therefore possible addressees, are
named.
96. “Dfjome: ‘<No se han lefdo casos de obispos que han temdo hijos?”’ (Suarez,
Relacion, 234).
97. See Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, 217—226.
 Notes to Pages 136—141 239

98. For example, a period notary cites in a 1735 document about a sale of property that
Ursula was present with the abbess at the time of the purchase (Guernica, Historia, 126).
99. Although, the nun who won the position of abbess on two occasions did not die
until 1745 (Guernica, Historia, appendix x).
100. See Ibsen, Women’s, 134.
101. Senor mio, {por que cuando usas de tus misericordias con las mujeres, anda la
Inquisicion conosiendo de ellas?” (Suarez, Relation, 252).
102. Ursula s confessor was fearful; she reports: “Teme por lo que susedio a fray Luis
de Granada, y en estos tiempos de la Carransa” (ibid., 253).
103. See Guernica, Historia, 303 and 210—227. The bishop who was in power during
Ursula’s time as abbess, Fernandez Rojas, also reinforced guidelines from the Council of
Trent on enclosure of nuns and focusing on the spiritual life.
104. See Ibsen, Women’s, 134.
105. For information about the 1730 earthquake, see Guernica, Historia, 115; for the
position of abbess in 1732, see ibid., 241—243.
106. A funerary sermon of Madre Castillo was written, but there was no hagiographic
biography. See McKnight’s important study, The Mystic of Tunja, 125.
107. Routt, “Authoring Orthodoxy”; Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters,

Chapter 6
My thanks to Mary E. Giles, Amanda Powell, and Linda Curcio-Nagy for their valuable
comments on an early draft of this paper, read at the Modern Languages Association in
San Francisco, 1998. An abbreviated version of this chapter was published in Kathleen Ann
Myers, Writing of the Frontier, ed. Santa Arias and Mariselle Melendez (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 2002). All translations of Catalina’s Vida are courtesy of Nina
M. Scott.
1. “The nuns were beside themselves when they took their leave of me, and I was
carried off in a litter with a retinue of six priests, four friars, and six swordsmen” (Stepto
and Stepto, Lieutenant Nun, chap. 21). The translation of Catalina’s title from “alferez” into
lieutenant is problematic. According to the second Relacion (1625), Catalina was promoted
to Sargento Mayor, but Vallbona (Vida i sucesos, i65ni2) says that official documents show
she only received the title of alferez, or ensign.
2. During much of this time, she went by the alias of Alonso Dfaz Ramirez de Guzman.
3. The petitions are reproduced, along with notarized testimony from witnesses, in
Vallbona’s edition of Vida i sucesos, appendix 2. These documents, among others, are also
reproduced in Tellechea Idigoras, Dona Catalina de Erauso. Both editions draw on Ferrer’s
Historia de la Monja Alferez and Medina’s Bihlioteca Hispano-Chilena, as well as new archival
material. The petitions include two separate ones to the Crown: one for remuneration for
Catalina’s military services and the other for compensation for a robbery that occurred
when she traveled to Rome in 1626. See Merrim, “Petition of Catalina de Erauso” for a
translation and study of the petition, which recounts her decision to cross-dress and be a
soldier. The memoirs have been edited on a handful of occasions. The most recent,
complete Spanish edition is Vallbona’s Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alferez. See the bibliography
in Vallbona for a complete listing of previous editions in English and Spanish. The only
one not listed that is of some importance is Pedro Rubio Merino’s recent La Monja Alferez
(1995). The document about Catalina’s share of her family estate is cited by Stepto from
Lucas G. Castillo Lara, La asombrosa historia de Dona Catalina de Erauso, xlii (Castillo 318);
Tellechea Idigoras’s Dona Catalina reproduces many of the family’s wills and estate
documents.
240 Notes to Pages 141—143

4. One of the few documents that describes Catalina during these years is reproduced
in Vallbona, Vida i Sucessos, 155. Another is the Tercera relation (Mexico 1653), discussed later
in this chapter.
5. For more about cross-dressing in seventeenth-century Spain, see Perry, Gender and
Disorder, chap. 6, and Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso: From Anomoly to Icon.” See also'
Velasco’s important new book, The Lieutenant Nun, chaps. 1—2.
6. This is Merrim’s central argument in her study and translation of this document;
see “Petition.”
7. For a history of the manuscript and its nineteenth-century publication, see
Vallbona, Vida i sucesos 2—3.
8. Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast has been one of the landmark works on this topic.
In the context of colonial Spanish America, see Routt’s “Authorizing Orthodoxy” and
Ibsen’s Women’s Spiritual Autobiography. For lengthier discussions of this topic with regard to
Catalina de Erauso in particular, see Merrim, Early Modem Women’s Writing, 13—18, and
Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, chap. 1.
9. For extensive, and often new, documentation on Catalina’s family, see Tellechea
Idigoras’s Dona Catalina. Also consult my chronology and note there for more information
about discrepancies about many dates for Catalina’s life.
10. Captain Miguel de Erauso was part of the Armada, and served in various other
positions as scribe and mayor; for more historical details on Catalina’s family, see
Tellechea Idigoras, Dona Catalina.
11. “Era mi inclinasion andar i ver el mundo” (Vallbona, Vida i Sucesos chap. 5).
12. For the full names of the sisters who entered the convent with Catalina and the
brothers who went to America, see Tellechea Idigoras, Dona Catalina.
13. “Y tambien hay pobres soberbios que ya que no pueden morder ladran, y siempre
andan con la cabeza baja mirando donde pueden hacer presa, ni se quieren sujetar ni hay
razon con ellos. A esta gente tal llaman soldados no porque lo sean, sino porque son bien
andantes de unos lugares para otros, siempre con los naipes en las manos, por no perder
ocasion de jugar con cuantos topan, y por si acaso topan con algun novicio o chapeton que
no esta diestro y bien disciplinado en su malicia, o que no alcance su malicia con naipes
falsos les dan mates y les quitan el dinero y la hacienda... Son grandisimos fulleros que su
cuidado no es otro mas que entender en el arte de enganar. Esta gente es mucha la que
anda por el Peru. Y todos por la mayor parte son enemigos de la gente rica y no desean
sino novedades y alteraciones y alborotos en el Reino, por robar en y meter en los codos
en los bienes de que no pueden alcanzar parte sino con guerra y disensiones. Es gente que
no quieren servir. Todos andan bien vestidos, porque nunca les falta una negra o una india
y algunas espanolas, y no de las mas pobres... Es mas la gente vagabunda que tiene el Pern
... y busquen su vida como mejor pudieron. A otra suerte de gente de menor cuantla y que
no puede usar tan bien ni con tanta libertad la arte de la adulacion ni tienen caudal para
andar en vagabundos de unas tierras a otras, y tambie'n porque se inclinan mas al trabajo y
al ejercicio de las armas y a comer a cuenta del rey, estos tales se meten soldados, porque
todos los anos se hace en Lima gente para el Reino de Chile. Y los llevan debajo de sus
banderas a pelear con los araucanos. Y les dan en Lima doscientos pesos, con que se visten.
Con esto limpian la tierra y envlan gente contra los indomables araucanos. Y pocos destos
soldados vuelven a Peru” (La inedita, 69—70).
14. “Hallandola, la truxeron ante Su Senorla [el obispo], vestida [de] calzon y ropilla
de perpetuam failesco y un ferruelo de cordellate pardo, sombrero bianco guarnecido de
trencilla de oro la halda y el cayrel, valon de puntas, jubon de raso bianco trencillado,
 Notes to Pages 147 241

coleto de ante guarnecido, espada y daga dorada” (as quoted in Tellechea Idigoras, Dona
Catalina, 61).
15. By most accounts these events took place around 1619, although the document that
records some of the inquiry made by the bishop is dated 1617. Perhaps this is merely an
error in the transcription of the document (see Tellechea Idigoras, Doha Catalina, 60-64).
This document is particularly interesting because there are several discrepancies about
Catalina s life, and it illustrates the sort of question and answer format of much period
inquiry that informed autobiographical narrative structures, as discussed in the introduc¬
tion to this book.
16. “La prosecucion honesta en adelante, i la abstmencia en ofender al proximo,
temiendo la ulcion de Dios sobre su mandamiento, non occides.” (Vallbona, Vida i sucesos,
chap. 25).
17. See Rubial, “Catalina de Erauso,” 115—117.
18. The anonymous satirist exclaims: “Vive Apolo, que sera/ un lego quien alabare/
desde hoy a la Monja Alfe'rez/ sino a la Monja Almirante” (Romance 48 in Sor Juana Ines
de la Cruz, Obras, 309).
19. For transcriptions of three broadsides—selections from a history, a play, and a
poem—as well as information about the Italian translations, see Valbona, Vida i sucesos,
appendices. Both Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso,” and Perry, Gender and Disorder, analyze
some of these works.
20. “Tenga fin aqui/ este caso verdadero/ donde llega la Comedia/ han llegado los
sucesos;/ que oy esta el Alferez Monja/ en Roma.” For analyses of Montalban’s
treatment of the manly woman character type in this play, see Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun,
60—70, and Perry, “La Monja Alferez.”
21. Relacion prodigiosa (Madrid 1625), Segunda parte de la relacion (Madrid 1625), and Fray
Diego de Rosales, Historia general del Reino de Chile (chap. 37). These are all reprinted in
Vallbona’s Appendixes. The broadsides also were reprinted in Mexico.
22. There are three versions of these memoirs; I use Vallbona’s edition of the standard
version, which is based on Ferrer’s (Historia) first edition of the text. Ferrer, in turn,
worked with Munoz’s eighteenth-century copy of a document in Seville; see Rubio
Merino, La monja, 18. Munoz’s version is housed at the Real Academia de Historia in
Madrid. This is a 1784 copy, which has eighteenth-century calligraphy but seventeenth-
century orthography and morphosyntax. According to most critics, the account was
completed between 1624 and 1626, then deposited in the publishing house of Bernardino
de Guzman in Madrid. Two alternate versions of the Vida were published for the first time
in 1995 by Rubio Merino and are based on late-seventeenth-century copies housed at the
Cathedral Archives in Seville. Of the two versions, M-I and M-II, only the first is
complete. It covers the same years and anecdotes as Vallbona’s edition, but there are
significant changes in the narration of certain events. I discuss one of the most significant,
the moment of confession to the bishop, later in this chapter (M-I, Rubio Merino; chap. 20
Vallbona). For more on the history of the manuscripts, see Medina, Bihlioteca Hispano-
Chilena; Rubio Medina, La Monja Alferez; and Vallbona, Vida i sucesos.
23. Several theories exist about the extent to which Catalina de Erauso had a hand in
the writing of her own memoirs. Most critics agree that she was extensively involved but
that the transcriber probably elaborated on her story either at the time of the original
composition or later when it was copied. Vallbona sets out her theories in Vida i sucesos,
2—11, and Merrim in “Catalina de Erauso,” 196.
24. See Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso,” 195.
242 Notes to Pages l/fj—ljo

25. Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 11.

26. El Carnero (1636—1638) by Rodriquez Freile and The Historia de Potosi by Arzans de
Orsua (first part of the eighteenth century) for example, have been studied for their
novelesque retelling of scaborous tales. Likewise, scholars point out the blurring of
Sigiienza y Gongora’s voice as transcriber with the first-person accounts of Ramirez’s
shipwreck in Naujragios and of nuns retelling the history of their convent in Paraiso occidental.
For a more thorough discussion of these hybrid genres, see Ross, The Baroque Narrative.
Many colonial scholars, such as Gonzalez-Echevarrfa in “The Law of the Letter,” note
that period accounts often defy traditional definitions of literary and historical genres; the
texts created a new type of writing.
27. See, for example, the documents in Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, appendix 2, and
Merrim, “Petition,” 37.
28. Garber, “Preface to Lieutenant Nun”; Juarez, “La mujer militar”; Merrim,
“Catalina de Erauso”; Perry, “La Monja Alferez”; Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun; and
Vallbona, Vida i Sucesos.
29. Perry, Gender and Disorder, chap. 6 “Sexual Rebels.”
30. Merrim, Early Modern, 13—15.
31. See also the case discovered by Velasco and her overview of the popularity of
female transvestitism in historical and literary works of the period. The Lieutenant Nun, 22—
23, 32—40.
32. The painting is in the colonial art collection at CONDUMEX, Mexico City. My
thanks to Manuel Ramos Medina for showing this to me.
33. Merrim, for example, briefly mentions the influence of the picaresque tone, the
theatricality of the narration, and the lack of mteriority or remorse characteristic of the
soldier’s life in “Catalina de Erauso,” 181, 195. Garber mentions the complex mixture of
literary forms from autobiography to pilgrimage and picaresque narrative structures in
Preface to Lieutenant Nun, xxiii, xxxiv; and Rubio Merino does as well in La Monja Alferez,
43—44, 50, 88. In the most extensive study of genre, Vallbona divides the narrative
according to the echoes from the picaresque (chaps. 1—5), the chronicle of conquest (chap. 6
and others), and cloak and dagger theatre and travel literature (chaps. 6, n—20), as well as
various popular story-telling influences throughout (chaps. 9—11). She also carefully
footnotes passages reminiscent of these genres.
34. For how this type of writing derived from bureaucratic, legal, and ecclesial models,
see Gonzalez-Echevarrfa, “The Law of the Letter,” 107—109; and Fernandez, Apology to
Apostrophe, chap. 1.
35. This is a term used by Fernandez in his study of Hispanic autobiography, Apology, 22.
36. These categories also correspond to the three that Levisi in Autohiograjias del siglo de
oro says are the predominant forms during Spain’s Golden Age (the memorial, picaresque,
and confession).
37. Although generally they were not published until the twentieth century, these
soldiers’ accounts may have circulated in manuscript form. For twentieth-century editions
of some of these, see Cossfo, Autohiograjias.
38. The text states her birth year as 1585, but the baptismal record states 1592; see
Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 151.
39. Gines de Pasamonte’s Vida (ca. 1604) (in Cossfo, Autohiograjias) is one of the few
soldier’s accounts that describes having a religious calling yet becoming a soldier because
he did not have the necessary background and money to enter the religious life.
40. Levisi uses this term in her book that examines three soldiers’ accounts, Auto¬
hiograjias, 141.
 Notes to Pages ijo—ijl

41. Garber emphasizes the memoirs’ frequent description of clothes and argues that
Catalina is a transvestite; she fails to place this emphasis, however, in the broader context
of soldiers’ accounts, which often talk of clothing as it related to status. See Garber’s
preface to Lieutenant Nun. It should be noted here that the descriptions of cities in the
memoirs often echo period chronicles, a genre not studied in this essay because it does not
fit into the life-writing focus.
42. “Juntamonos otros quantos con el, i alojamonos en los llanos de Valdivia en
campana raza, cinco mil hombres con harta incomodidad. Tomaron i asolaron los Yndios
la dicha Valdivia... Viendola [bandera] llevar, partimos tras ella yo i dos Soldados de
caballo por medio de grande multitud, atropellando i matando, i recibiendo dano: en breve
cayo muertos uno de los tres. Proseguimos los dos. Legamos a la vandera, cayo de un bote
de lanza mi companero. Yo recibi un mal golpe en una pierna. Mate al Cacique que la
llevaba i quitesela, i aprete con mi caballo, atropellando, matando i hiriendo a infinidad,
pero mal herido, i pasado de tres flechas, i de una lanza en el ombro izquierdo que sentfa
mucho. En fin, llegue a mucha gentre i caf luego del caballo... quede Alferez de la
companfa de Alonso Moreno... i holgue mucho” (Vallbona, La Monja, Chap. 6).
43. “Mass was held in the jail, and when the priest had taken communion he gave it to
me and turned back to the altar, and I instantly spat the wafer out into my right hand,
shouting madly, ‘I call on the church! I call on the church!’ Complete bedlam ensued. The
brothers were scandalized and kept shouting, ‘Heretic! Heretic!’ ... The priests circled round
me, along with a great number of townspeople—they lighted candles, unfurled a canopy over
my head, and carried me in procession into the sacristy, where everyone got down on their
knees and a priest pried the wafer from my hand and placed it in the tabernacle.. . . This was
a scheme I had come up with thanks to a pious Franciscan, who gave me some words of
wisdom when I was in jail, and took my last confession. The governor kept the church
surrounded, with me under lock and key” (chap. 15). According to Catholic belief, the
consecrated host became the actual body of Christ in the process of transubstantiation and
could only be touched by the hands of a priest. Similar treatment of the church can be seen
in Miguel Castro’s parody of the canonical hours; see Pope, La autobiografia espafiola, 197.
44. Catalina, Vida, chap. 9.
45. As we will see, Alonso de Conteras is the closest in tone. Others, such as Castro’s
Vida (ca. 1609) and Pasamonte’s Vida i trabajos (ca. 1605) (in Cossio, Autobiografias'), have
elements of the picaresque, especially Castro’s retelling of amorous encounters, but they
also include a structure based on trials (and, therefore, deserving of merit). For more on
the development of the genre, see Pope, La autobiografia, and Levisi, Autobiografias.
46. As an example of the first, Pope studies the account by Charles V’s soldier Diego
Garda de Paredes (1468—1533). Examples of more roguish accounts are Miguel Castro’s
story (ca. 1612) of swordfights and brawls, and the duke of Estrada’s contradictory
Comentarios de el desenganado (1614, 1633, 1642). According to Pope, by as early as the first
decade of the seventeenth century in Diego Suarez Montanez’s Discurso verdadero (ca. 1610),
the soldier-autobiographer wished to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, and thus the narrator
incorporated elements of the popular picaresque form; he recounts his “naturaleza y
inclinasion y curso de la vida, para enterar a los lectores de mis partes y vivienda, en el
curioso que lo quisiere, aberigurar lo hallara asf sin discrepar punto de verdad” (quoted in
Pope, La autobiografia, 123).
47. Quoted in Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes, 485.
48. Estebamllo Gonzalez, La vida y bechos de Estebanillo Gonzalez, hombre de buen humor,
compuesta por tl mismo, Antwerp 1646; there were at least five other editions published in
Madrid during the next hundred years. See Pope, La autobiografia, chap. 4.
244 Notes to Pages tjt—tjj

49. Pope (La autobiografia, 140) sees this as manifesting itself as “la desadaptacion” that
was increasingly expressed after 1600, as a “perplejidad ante las nuevas condiciones sociales
que los autobiografos que siguen resolveran adecuadamente con una abierta aceptacion de
la inseguridad y la aventura.”
50. Catalina resubmitted her petition to the Consejo de Indias in August 1625, and in
April 1626, after presenting a case to the king, she was granted remuneration for her
services. For the chronology of these documents, see Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 119, 121.
51. According to his own Vida (ca. 1630), Contreras (in Cossio Autobiografias') left home
at a young age after killing a boy; he served in the army, was promoted to alfe'rez and later
captain, met both the king and pope, and became the subject of a famous playwright’s
drama. He also was a rogue, killed to protect his honor, and gambled. See the edition of
his Vida in Cossio’s Autobiografias de soldados. Lope de Vega’s El rey sin reino is very loosely
based on Contreras’s life. Contreras lived with Lope from 1622 to 1623.
52. Only in later additions, once things no longer were going his way, is there evidence
of a petition. Levisi (Autobiografias, 129, 130) discusses the 1633 and 1641 additions. See also
Pope, La autobiografia, 148—164.
53. Stepto and Stepto, Lieutenant Nun, xl.
54. According to Vallbona’s division in Vida i sucesos, 9, chapters 1—5 correspond to the
picaresque.
55. “Es de saber que esta Dona Beatriz de Cardenas era Dama de mi amo, i el mirava a
tenernos seguros, a ml, para servicio, i a ella, para gusto... una noche me encerro i se
declaro en que a pesar del diablo havfa de dormir con ella... i dixe luego a mi amo que de
tal casmiento no havfa que tratar, porque por todo el mundo yo no lo harfa. A lo qual el
porfio, i me promtetio montes de oro’’ (Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, chap. 3).
56. See Cruz’s use of the term, “The Picaresque as Discourse of Poverty,” and
Mandrell’s discussion of sexual desirability in “Questions of Genre and Gender,” 152.
57. In “La confesion en jerigonza,” Rabell argues that much of the slang used in the
Lazarillo text has sexual innuendos.
58. See the documents in Tellechea Idigoras, Dona Catalina, and Vallbona, Vida i sucesos.
59. See Stepo and Stepto, Lieutenant Nun, xl—xli, and Perry, Gender and Disorder, 135.
60. For a discussion of this dynamic in the Lazarillo de Tormes text, see Rosenberg,
The Circular Pilgrimage, 75, 81—86.
61. Like many of the dates associated with Catalina’s life, there is a discrepancy in
different accounts. A letter recording the encounter with the bishop is dated in Tellechea
Idigoras as 1617 (Dona Catalina, 61—65), but by other accountings this would have had to
take place around 1619 because the Vida says the bishop died five months later.
62. For a study of these differences between men’s and women’s spiritual vidas, see
Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, chap. 2, and McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja, 54-59.
63. It is interesting to note that in the last chapter, Loyola’s transcriber mentions that
he has added some of his own comments to the narrative.
64. It is important to note that one of the manuscript versions that Rubio Merino
published in 1995 renders this scene in a very different light. The same biographical
elements are present, but the more literary reworking of it is absent: “Preguntome [el
obispo] en forma quien era. De donde. Hija de quien. Fuy respondiendo. Apartome un
poco y preguntome si era Monja y la causa y modo de la salida del convento. Dfxesela.
Porfiome con preguntas sobre esto, porque no se podia a ello persuadir. Tornome a decir
que le dixesse la verdad y que ya vena yo que podia fiarme. Dfxele: Illmo. Senor, no hay
mas que lo que he dicho y si V.S. illma. Es servido, nombre personas honestas que me
vean, que liana estoy.” She goes on to report the medical examination: “Yo me manifeste.
 Notes to Pages ljj—160 245

Elios me miraron y se satisficieron de que verdaderamente estaba virgen” (Rubio Merino,

La Monja Alferez, M-I, 86).
65. Senor... la verdad es esta: que soi muger; que nacl en tal parte, hija de fulano i
sutana; que me entraron de tal edad en tal Convento con fulana mi tfa; que all! me crie; que
tome el habito; que tuve noviciado; que estando para profesar, por tal ocasion me sail; que
me fui a tal parte, me desnude, me vest!, me corte' el cabello; parti alii i aculla me embarque,
aporte, trahine, mate, heri, malee, corretee, hasta venir a parar en lo presente i a los pies de
Su Senorla Ilustrlsima.”
66. Catalina, Vida, chap. 2.
67. Ibid.
68. Corrio la noticia de este suceso por todas partes, y los que antes me vieron y los
que antes y despues supieron mis cosas en todas las Indias, se maravillaron” (chap. 20).
69. “Dame otra Monja Alferez, y le concedere lo mismo” (Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 171).
70. Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso,” discusses the role of fame in this construction.
71. For example, Ursula Suarez went to China, Madre de Agreda bilocated to New
Mexico, and Madre Marla de San Jose had a vision of being in Rome.
72. “En habito de hombre, con espada y daga, guarniciones de plata, algunos malos
pelillos por varba, Y era el guapo de los guapos. Tenia una gran ana de mulas y negros con
que conducla ropa a Mexico” (letter from Fray Diego de Sevilla, as quoted by Rubio
Merino, La Monja Aferez, 133).
73. Vallbona restored the fluctuation between feminine and masculine adjectives that
is found in the original manuscript copy; the use of masculine adjectives, however,
dominates. She also notes that the first two broadsides use the feminine, but there is
fluctuation between the masculine and feminine in the third Relation, See Vallbona, Vida i
sucesos, 2—5, i6in5.
74. These broadsides are reproduced in Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, appendix 3.
75. Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 173, 174.
76. Palafox might have known Catalina, since she would probably have passed through
Puebla as she transported goods from the Port of Veracruz along the Royal Road to
Mexico City.
77. Rosales’s history is based on Domingo Sotelo Romay’s notes for a history of
Chile. As a Jesuit chronicler, Romay had been chosen to write the history, but he never
completed it. The history apparently was not published until the nineteenth century.
According to Vallbona, this is the only document that completely changes Catalina’s life;
see Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, i8in4 and 183^, and Medina, Biblioteca Hispano-Chilena, 221—225.
78. “Desecha en lagrimas como otra Magdalena se fue determinada a no hazer caso de
la murmuracion del fariseo, el mundo, a postrarse a los pies de Christo y labarselos con las
lagrimas de sus ojos y limpiarlos con sus cabellos, y se echo a los pies del Licenciado... y
le pidio con muchas lagrimas le oyesse de confesion, y descubriendole todo el discurso de
su vida, resulta en lagrimas, se resolvio a no apartarse hasta salir para el Convento”
(Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 182—183).
79. Merrim, Early Modem, zi. If the Vida i sucesos can be relied on, the priest to whom
Catalina first confessed not only allowed her to continue being dressed as a man, but
helped her escape, once he saw she was not inclined to return to the cloister (chap. 18).
80. Perry, Gender and Disorder, 131, 135.
81. Vallbona reproduces a document that includes a description of the patriotic roles
of Catalina’s brothers and father: “Alferez Miguel de Herausso y Francisco de Herausso
que sirvio en la armada de Lima con don Rodrigo de Mendoza, y Domingo de Herauso,
se fue en el armada que salio para el Brassil, y bolbiendo de alia fue uno de los que
246 Notes to Pages 160—166

perecieron en la Almirata de las Quatro Villas, que se quemo, que todos tres fueron sus
hermanos” (1626 Petition, Vida i sucesos, 133). Stepto and Stepto (Lieutenant Nun, xxvii) also
note that Catalina’s father, a military captain, may have served in the American colonies
and that Mariana Erauso married, while the other three sisters—Mari Juana, Isabel, and
Jacinta—became nuns at the Convent of San Sebastian.
82. Perry, Gender and Disorder, 131—133; Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso, 185. Both studies
base many of their conclusions on a variety of recent studies that examine the topic.
83. Merrim, “Catalina de Erauso,” 185—186, cites Dugaw’s work, Warrior Women and
Popular Balladry. Wheelright, Amazons and Military Maids, and Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior
Women, also touch on the topic. Davis, “The Reasons for Misrule," in Society and Culture,
examines the extent of cross-dressing found in France during Carnival. See also Velasco’s
important new study on the topic, The Lieutenant Nun.
84. Juarez, “La mujer militar,” 151. Socolow, “The Women” and Pumar Martinez,
Espanolas en Indias.
85. See Pumar Martinez, Espanolas en Indias, 78—84, 85—94.
86. See McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 540—541.
87. Arzans de Orsua, Elistoria de la villa imperial de Potosi, L. VI, c. 6; L. IX, c. 6.
88. Wheelright, Amazons, 18; Dugar, Warrior Women. “Fuimos bien recibidos por la falta
de gente que habla en Chile” (chap. 6).
89. Diego de Rosales complains, “como si en otras partes no se hiciese la guerra sin
mujeres y sin ciradas, que si solamente sirvieran de criadas fuera tolerable; pero ni ellas ni
ellos se contentan con eso, sino que usando de ellas para sus apetitos desordenados, va el
ejercito cargado de pecados... uno de las prmicpales desgracias y azotes de este Reyno es
este desorden de amancebamiento con las criadas” (quoted in Salinas, Las chilenas, 19). In
1602 the governor of Chile, Alonso de Ribera, set up new rules for the military which
aimed at standardizing the army and doing away with such practices, but they were not
followed on the frontiers to the south of Santiago (see Salinas, Las chilenas, 19).
90. “Que estos milagros suelen acontecer en estos conflictos i mas en Yndias. Gracias
a la vela industria” (Vallbona, chap. 10).
91. See Merrim, “Catalina,” 190. Interestingly, Christine of Sweden, who had helped
the Counter-Reformation with her conversion to Catholicism and abdication of her
throne, later caused the Catholic Church great embarrassment for her transvestite
tendencies in Rome, but the church apparently did little to stop her.
92. “The Ensign Dona Catalina de Erauso, resident and native of the town of San
Sebastian, in the province of Guipuzcoa, says that of the last 19 years, she has spent 15 in
the service of Your Majesty in the wars of the kingdom of Chile and the Indians of Peru,
having traveled to those parts in men's garb owing to her particular inclination to take up
arms in the defense of the Catholic faith and in the service of Your Majesty, without being
known in the aforesaid kingdom of Chile, during the entire time she spent there as other
than a man” (as translated by Merrim, “Petition,” 37).
93. “I would prefer, my daughters, that in no way you be women, nor resemble them
in the least, but rather strong men, for if women behave as they should the Lord will make
them so manly that they will inspire terror even in men” (as quoted in Merrim, “Catalina
de Erauso,” 188).

Conclusions
1. My thanks to Asuncion Lavrin for explaining this practice to me.
2. For a study of this period, see Rubial La santidad, 42.
3. Rivas, “Gran cosa,” 123^7.
 Notes to Pages 166—167 247

4. See Rubial’s excellent study of this process of secularization, in La santidad, 15—16.

5. In the case of Madre Maria de San Jose"s convents, for example, they were affected
by the reforms implemented by Benito Juarez in the 1860s. Nevertheless, her first convent
in Puebla continued to operate in secret until the 1920s. See Word from New Spain, 10—11.
6. Rivas, “Gran cosa,” 115—126.
7. Rubial La santidad, 86—87.
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Rivas, Emma. ‘“Gran cosa es el buen exemplo que muebe con mucha facilidad’: Lecturas
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Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.
Agreda, Madre de, 83, 2450.71
Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco, 59, ioi, 109, no,
114, 2200.35
Aguilera, Francisco de, 51, 52, 54, 65, 66, 67
Aleman, Padre Antonio, 131, 136, 139
Aleman, Mateo, 124, 234n.44, 236n.66
Alexander VII, Pope, 29
alumbrados (illuminists), 7, n, 12, 14, 78,
2I2n.26
Rosa de Lima and, 28, 33, 34, 2i4n.53
Amazon warrior women, 143
Ana de San Bartolome, 2240.31
Angulo, Domingo, 24
Anne, Saint, 57
Anthony of Padua, 70, 74, 79
Antonia de la Madre de Dios, 87, 2250.37
apologia por vita sua, 82, 103, 149
Arce, Juan, 106—7
Arenal, Electa, ix, 138
Asbaje, Pedro Manuel de, 96
asceticism, 25, 32, 70, 73, 84
Augustine, Saint, 13, 83, 148
Confessions, n, 117
Augustinian Recollects, 69, 70, 74
autobiographies. See confessional
autobiographies; journals; spiritual
autobiographies; vidas
autohagiography, 11, 72, 117
autos-da-fe, 8, 34, 63, 166
Bames-Karol, Gwendolyn, 62
Barreto, Isabel de, 160
Barros, Manuel de, 76, 82
beatas, 34, 41—42, 45, 234n.47
Counter-Reformation and, 14, 16
Marfa de San Jose' as, 69, 70, 72, 73
Bell, Rudolph, 13
Benassy-Berling, Marie-Ce'cile, 109
Benedict XIV, Pope, 166
Bernard of Clairvaux, 79
Berruecos Lopez, Antonia, 73
Bible, vii, 40, 51, 108, 159
Bilbao, Luis de, 28, 2i2n.24, 2i4n-56
biographies, religious. See hagiographies
bodies, women’s, 141, 143, 148
Bourbon monarchy, 138, 166
Bradstreet, Anne, 225n.i
Brigit, Saint, 78
broadsides, 19, 146, 158—59
buenas costumbres, 12, 58
Burke, Peter, 13, 66
Burns, Kathryn, 67
Bynum, Carolyn Walker, ix, 13
Cabrera, Miguel, no—11
Calleja, Diego de, 113, 114
Campo, Alonso del, 233m 18
canonization, ix, 7, 8, 11, 19, 77, 166
changes in process of, 31—32, 48, 60, 61,
166, 22on.34
codification of processes of, 12
hagiographic role in, 5, 12—13, :5< 62
See also under Rosa de Lima
Canovas, Rodrigo, 118
Cardenas, Beatriz de, 152
Cardenas, Juan Diomsio de, 83
Carlos II, king of Spam, 54
Carlos V, king of Spain, 3
Carmelites, 74, 148
Carranza, Angela, 137
Carta al Padre Nunez (Juana Ines de la Cruz),
95, 98, 99, 102, 108
Carta atenagorica (Juana Ines de la Cruz), 94,
95, 98—101, 103, 109, 113, 227—28n>37
Carta de Serafina de Cristo (1691), 226n.i3, 2280.41
Carvajal, Augustin de, 145, 154, 155—56
Castillo, Fernando del, 210n.11
Castillo, Juan del, 28, 33—34, 35, 37, 2140.54
Castillo, Madre, ix, 138, 2100.23
Castillo y Altra, Hypolito, 49
Castro, Miguel, 2430.43, 2430.46
Catalina de Erauso. See Erauso, Catalina de
Catarina de San Juan, 44—68, 89, 94, 114, 115,
135, 164, 165
biographical overview of, 48—50
chronology of, 68
hagiographic biography of, 16, 44, 45—48,
50—65, 67, 72, 93, 99, 159, 161
hagiographic selections, 177—82
male disguise of, 140
265
266 Index

Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, log confessional autobiographies, vii, vii—ix, 4—7,

Catherine of Siena, Saint, 16, 78, 215^75, n, 15, 17, 19, 70, 89, 125, 154, 157,
2i6n.87 166
Marfa de San Jose and, viii, 70, 73 gender and, 148,149
Mariana de San Joseph and, 80, 224^23 imitatio Cbristi as inspiration for, 6
Rosa de Lima and, 25, 26, 27, 31, 35, 37, 41, Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 99, 102, 105,
210n.11, 2iin.i3 108
Catherine the Martyr, Saint, 51 Marfa de San Jose and, viii, 5, 17, 69—89,
Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic 117, 132, 133, 154
Church mystic triad and, 81—82, 132, 154
Cayetano, Bruno, 24 Rosa de Lima and, 36—37
censorship, 7,11, 14, 46—48, 51, 56, 63, 65, 145, Teresa of Avila and, 14—15
161, 165. See also Index of Prohibited Ursula Suarez and, 117, 130
Books See also rescripting; spiritual
Cervantes, Miguel de, 157—58 autobiographies; vidas
chastity, vow of, 67, 154 Confessions (Augustine), xi, 117
Chavez, Margarita, 48 confessors, 6, 8, 10, 40, 2150.67
Chile, 160, 162 nuns and, 4, 14, 17, 82—83, 95, 99, 107, 131—
Catalina de Erauso and, 19, 140, 144, 146, 32. 135. 154
150, 158—62, 164, 167 Congregation of Holy Rites, 8, 12, 16, 28, 32,
Ursula Suarez and, 118—23, 164—65 45. 54. 7i. 78, 166
China Poblana, La. See Catarina de San Consejo de Indias, 28, 145, 164, 2440.50
Juan Contreras, Alonso de, 152, 2440.51
Christine, queen of Sweden, 162, 246n.gi Convent de la Plaza, 119, 121—22, 131, 137,
Christine de Pizan, 107 233m 18
Cicero, too, 103 Convent of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad,
Clare, Saint, 78, 79 76, 2230.3
Clarists, 119, 121 Convent of Santa Monica, 13, 69, 74, 84, 87
Clement IX, Pope, 29 convents, 3, 5, 16, 40, 72, 137—38. See also
Clement X, Pope, 23, 29 enclosure
Clement XI, Pope, 76 corazones varoniles, 13, 70, 78
clergy, 6, 13 Council of the Indies. See Consejo de Indias
mystic triad and, 81—82, 132, 154 Council of Trent (1545-1563), 152, 2160.87
rescripting by, 17,18, 41, 72, 84, 86—87, art and literature guidelines of, 8, 62, 63
110—15 interpretations of holiness of, 7, 45
See also confessors perpetual enclosure requirement of, 16,
Clfmaco, San Juan, 40 40
clothing, soldiers’ tales mentions of, 150. See sainthood guidelines of, 12, 29, 45, 48, 54,
also cross-dressing 61
Columbus, Christopher, 114 Counter-Reformation, 6—14, 16, 62, 67
comedia genre, 19, 118, 134, 159 changes in canonization process and, 31—
communion, 32 32, 45, 48
Concilio Limense (1567; 1582—1583), 8, 25 individual spiritual practices and, 7, 8, 70
Conde de Galve, Viceroy, 59, 2200.33 Rosa de Lima and, 24, 45,141
confession, ix, 7, 15, 16—17, 19. 32. 155—56, See also Council of Trent
'59 criollos, 25, 65, 87
judicial, 12 hagiographic tradition and, 5
post-Tridentine emphasis on, 8 identity concerns of, 114, 165
preparatory notes for, 10—n, 102, 118, 123, in Puebla, 49—50
131 Rosa de Lima and, 24, 29
See also confessors Ursula Suarez and, 118—19

cross-dressing, 141—43, 148, 153, 157—58, 160-
62, 2430.41
Cruz, Juana Ines de la. See Juana Ines de
la Cruz
cuentas de conciencia, 10, 102, 118, 123, 131
Davis, Natalie Zemon, ix
decorum, importance of, 62, 221—220.45
De los prodigies... (Ramos), 16, 46—48, 51—60,
63, 22onn.33, 35, 2210.36
Delrio, Martin, 78
Demetrios, 100
devotio moderna, 7, 37
devotional cults, 16, 45, 63, 65—66
devotos de monjas, 121, 123, 124, 129—30, 133, 137,
2360.66, 2370.83
Discalced Carmelites, 97
divine call. See vos me coegistis
Domingo (Catarina de San Juan’s husband),
49> 53-54- 56-57
Dominicans, 66, 143, 2120.24
Rosa de Lima and, 23, 26—29, 35> 37> 7°
dowries, 73, 74, 76, 97, 99, 119
Dugaw, Diane, 161
emblem books, 37
enclosure, 41—42, 70, 114, 121, 137, 141
perpetual, 14, 16, 26, 40, 74
England, 160, 161
Enigmas ojrecidos a la Casa del Placer (Juana Ines
de la Cruz), 109, no, 2300.74
Enlightenment, 166
entradas, 144, 161
epistolary genre, 17, 18, 95, 96, 99—108, 166
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 100, 103
Erauso, Catalina de, viii, 18—19, >40—63, 164,
166—67, 2.26n.i4
biographical overview of, 140, 143—46
chronology of, 163
hagiographic writings about, 158—59
male disguise of, 140, 141, 142, 143
social flux and, 159—63, 165
Vida i sucesos de la Monja Aljerez, 141, 144—
63
Vida selections, 201—8
Erauso, Miguel de (father), 143, 2400.10,
245—460.81
Erauso, Miguel de (son), 144
Ercilla, Alonso de, 157, 160, 162
Escala mistica, La (Rosa de Lima), 36, 39, 40
Escobar Lillo, Marfa de, 118-19, 232-3311.12
Index 267
escritoras por obediencia, 14, 17, 82, 83, 103, 108,
.
135 149
Esofrina, Saint, 148
Estrada, duke of, 2430.46
Estrada, Marfa, 160
Eugenia of Alexandria, 141, 143
experimentados, 13, 105, 108
Fama y obras postumas (Juana Ine's de la Cruz),
no—13, 1x4
fasting, 27, 73, 105
Felipe de Jesus, 166
female rogue. See rogues
feminist studies, 95, 118, 166
Ferdinand, king of Spain, 11
Fernandez de Santa Cruz, Manuel, viii, 50,
58, 69, 72-73. 74. 76, 77, 78, 84, 86,
94, 100, 101—2, 103, 109, 164, 2200.33,
2240.29, 2280.42
Ferrer, Joaquin Marfa de, 147, 163
First Dream (Juana Ine's de la Cruz), 98
Flores, Gaspar de, 25—26
Flores de Oliva, Isabel. See Rosa de Lima
France, vii, 6, 166
Franciscans, 26, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 151
Francis of Borja, Saint, 100
Francis of Sales, Saint, 78, 2280.42
free will, 95, 100, iox
French Revolution, 166
funerary sermons, 4, 44, 77, 87
Galarraga y Arce, Marfa Perez de, 143
Galen, 148
Galve, Luis, 24
Gamboa, Marfa de, 121, 136, 2340.36
Gamboa, Tomas de, 123, 131, 136
Garber, Marjorie, 148
Garcia de Paredes, Diego, 2430.46
Gaumanga, bishop of. See Carvajal,
Augustin de
gender
autobiographical writing and, n, 148—49,
>54-55
Catalina de Erauso’s life story and, 141,
148, 150—58, 162—63, 166—67
Church role and, 7, 25, 106—8, 114, 131, 134
frontier social flux and, 160—63
Juana Ines de la Cruz’s defense of learned
women and, 106—7
patriarchy and, 133, 152, 153, 160
Rosa de Lima’s life story and, 141
268 Index

gender (continued) Ibsen, Kristine, ix, 118, 124, 134, 136, 238^94
spirituality and, 13, 17 identity, vii, 19, 24
women’s bodies concepts and, 141, 143, criollo, 114, 165
148 cross-dressed women and, 157—58
See also cross-dressing; religious women rewritings of, 166—67
Gertrud, Saint, 78 sexual, 148—49
Getino, Luis, 24 vidas as formulation of, viii
Giles, Mary E., ix women as symbols of national, 24, 67, 115,
Glantz, Margo, 114 116—67
Godinez, Miguel, 49, 50 Ignatius of Loyola, 33, 37, 155
Gonzalez de Acuna, Antonio, 29, 2i2n.28 illuminists. See alumbrados
Gonzalez, Estebanillo, 151 imitatio Christi, 79, 87
Gorospe, Juan de, 74, 22on>35 Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 102, 103, 105—6
graciosa, 118, 124 as sainthood requirement, 32
Graxeda, Jose Castillo de, 48, 51, 56—63, 65, sanctity and, 12
177-82 as vida inspiration, 6—7
Graziano, Frank, 24 imitation
Greenleaf, Richard, 46 of Christ. See imitatio Christi
Greenspan, Kate, n of lives of saints, 41, 61, 70, 79
Gregory IX, Pope, 61 Incarnation, 6
Guernica, Juan de, 137 indigenous people. See Native Americans
Index of Prohibited Books, 7, 8, 14, 46, 56,
hagiographies, vii—ix, 3—12, 62, 166 165
canonization process and, 5, 12—13, !5> 62 individual spirituality. See spirituality
changes in. See rescripting Ines, Saint, 51
Catalina de Erauso and, 158—59 Inquisition, ix, 19, 83, 2i6n.3, 230—31^75, 31261
imitatio Christi as inspiration for, 6 autos-da-fe, 8, 34, 63, 166
structure and rhetoric of, 6, 15, 32, 62—63, Catarina de San Juan and, 16, 45—48, 51,
79 58—59, 63, 65, 67, 99, 161
Ursula Suarez’s lack of, 118, 137-38 censorship by, 7,11, 14, 46—48, 51, 56, 63,
Teresa of Avila’s impact on, 14—15 65, 145, 161, 165
See also under Catarina de San Juan; Juana initiatives of, 7, 8, 11—12
Ines de la Cruz; Marfa de San Jose; Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 93, 103, 106, no
Rosa de Lima Marfa de San Jose and, 71, 78, 79
Hansen, Leonard, 23, 26—27, 29, 32> 33—34, 35, Rosa de Lima and, 16, 18, 24, 27, 28, 33—35,
48, 52, 62, 70, 84 78, 164
heart, symbolism of, 37, 40 Teresa of Avila and, 14, 40, 59
heretics, ix, 7, 8, ix, 46, 61, 107, 133 vida requirements of, 8, 124
heroic virtue inquisition, process of, 8, 15
religious women and, 8, 41, 78—79, 141, Isabel, Saint, 78
!43 Isabel (La Catolica), queen of Spain, n, 162
sainthood and, 7, 32 Isabel de Jesus, 224n.24
Herpoel, Sonja, ix Isabel de la Encarnacion, 50, 72, 78
Hieronymites, 97 Iwasaki, Fernando, 24, 40
Hildegard of Bingen, 78, 215^74
historias cenadas, 150 Jerome, Saint, 100, 106, 107, 224^23
holiness. See sanctity Jesuits. See Society of Jesus
Holy Office of the Inquisition. See Joan of Arc, 143, 162
Inquisition John of the Cross, Saint, 7, 33, 36, 40, 79, 83,
humor, 18, 116—18, 131—33 2I5n-74
 Index 269

journal (of Marfa de San Jose), viii, 5, 17, 69- Lima (Peru), 3, 7, 25, 138, 2090.1
89, 117, 132, 133, 154 autos-da-fe in, 8, 34
Juana de San Agustfn, 80 Catalina de Erauso and, 18, 140, 141, 144,
Juana Ines de la Cruz, ix, 17—18, 58, 78, 93— 145. 164
115, 157, 161, 164, 165 Inquisition in, 8, 11, 24, 33—35
biographical overview of, 96—98 Rosa de Lima and, 23—24, 27, 28, 29, 162,
chronology of life of, 115 164
contemporary studies of, 95, 135, 162, 166 social conditions in, 25
as dramatist, 116, 134 literature, guidelines for, 62—63. $ee a^°
Catalina de Erauso compared with, viii, censorship
146 lives of the saints, vii, 5. See also
hagiographies of, 18, 108—15, t59 hagiographies; vidas
perfecta religiosa model and, 18, 94, 96, 108— Loayza, Pedro, 26, 28, 2130.41
10, 113, 114, 143 Lopez, Gregorio, 35, 210n.11
Ursula Suarez compared with, 122, 129, Lorenzana, Juan de, 33—34
130, 145 Luis de Granada, 37, 40, 62, 83, 100, 137,
works 2240.23

Carta al Padre Nufiez, 95, 98, 99, 102, 108
Carta atenagorica, 94, 95, 98—101, 103, 109,
113, 227—280.37
Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer, 109,
no, 2300.74
Famay obras pSstumas, no—13, 114
First Dream, 98
La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, 17, 50,
94—108, 113, 133, 228n<43
La Respuesta selections, 191—98. See Juana
Ines de la Cruz
Juan de Macfas, 2ion-9
Juarez, Encarnacion, 148, 160
Juarez Reforms (1860s), 2230.3, 2470.5
Luther, Martin, 5, 7, 8, 107
Magdalena de la Cruz, 78
Magdalene of Pazzis, Saint, 78
Maldonado, Angel de, 76, 77, 82—83, 86,
2240.29, 2250.41
male clergy. See clergy
male disguise. See cross-dressing
Mancera, marquise of, 96, 98
Mapuche, 144,150, 160
Marcela, Sor, 138
Margaret of Antioch, 141, 143
Maria Ana Aguedo de San Ignacio, 138,
2ion.23

Judaism, 7, 12 Marfa de Jesus, 72, 2100.23

Marfa de Jesus Tomelfn, 41, 49, 50, 78,
Lagos, Marfa Ines, 118 2170.10

Lateran Council, 8 Marfa de la Antigua, 70, 79, 117, 129, 133, 137,
Lavrin, Asuncion, viii—ix 2240.31

Lawand, Jamile Trueba, 100 Marfa de la Anunciacion, 78

laypeople, 8, 25. See also beatas Marfa de la Visitacion, 59, 83
Lazarillo de Formes (anonymous), 124, 127, Marfa de San Jose, 5—6, 13, 14, 16—17, 18, 69—
152 89, 93—96, 101—4, 107, 119, 131, 136, 157,
Leon, Luis de, 7, 33, 83 164, 166, 2260.14, 2450.71
Leon, Nicolas, 45, 2220.51 biographical overview of, 72—77
Leonard, Irving, 109 chronology of, 89
Lerner, Gerda, 13 confessional journals of, viii, 5, 69—72, 75—
letrados, 13, 105, 108 77. 79—81, 87-89, 117, 132, 133, 154
Libro de la vida (Teresa of Avila), it, 14, 40, 59, hagiography of, viii, 5—6, 70, 77, 78, 84—
80, 83, X02, 155, 2240.23 87, 159, 2380.92
Lieutenant Nun. See Erauso, Catalina de siblings of, 74, 2230.13, 226n.i6, 226n.i8
life writings. See confessional Vida excerpt, 183—90
autobiographies; hagiographies; vidas Marfa de Santo Domingo, ix
270 Index
Mariana de Escobar, 133
Mariana de Quito, 41—42, 2ion.23, 2i2n.29
Mariana de San Joseph, 70, 79, 80, 81,
224n.23
Mariana of Austria, queen of Spain, 29
Martin de Porres, 2ion.9, 2220.57
Martinez Hampe, Teodoro, 24
Maza, Francisco de la, 45, 2220.51
Maza, Gonzalo de la, 27—28, 2140.54
McKnight, Kathryn Joy, ix
McNamara, Jo Ann, 13
Melendez, Juan de, 23, 31, 2120.24.
Melgarejo, Maria Luisa, 28, 34, 2iin.i9
memorial de servicios y meritos, 147—48, 150, 152
Mendoza family, 160
Mercedes, Las (Rosa de Lima), 36, 39, 40
Merrim, Stephanie, 146, 148, 159, 160, 162
Mexican Inquisition, n, 16, 45, 46, 166,
2i6n.3
Mexico
post-independence secularization in, 166,
223n-3, 2470.5
See also New Spain; Puebla
Mexico City, 3, 11, 66, 72, 93, 96—97
Miguel, Francesca de, 2170.12
Millones, Luis, 24
miracles, 32, 60
Monica, Saint, 13
Monja Aljerez. See Erauso, Catalina de
Montalban, Juan Perez de, 146, 158, 159
Montecinos, Sonia, 118
Montero, Joseph, 79
Morgan, Ronald J., 45
mortification, 26—27, 35> 73, 84, 105, 117
Moscoso, Juana Mexia, 49
Moses, 51, 103, 108
mujeres varoniles, 13, 118, 124, 141, 143, 160,
2340.41, 2380.94
Mujica Pinilla, Ramon, 24, 34, 2140.53
Muriel, Josefina, ix
mystics, ix, 13—14, 33—34, 104, 138. See also
alumbrados; Catarina de San Juan;
Maria de San Jose; Rosa de Lima;
Teresa of Avila
mystic triad, 81—82, 132, 154
Nader, Helen, 160
national identity symbols, 24, 67, 115, 166—
67
Native Americans, n, 25, 46, 67
New France, ix, 6
New Spain (Mexico), 3—6, 7, 8, 72, 86, 93—
94, 115, 160, 161, 164, 2230.3
autos-da-fe' in, 8, 166
Catarina de San Juan and, 44—46, 50—54,
57. 67
Catalina de Erauso and, 141, 144—46, 153
Inquisition in, 8, 11, 16, 45, 46, 166, 2i6n.3
printing and publishing in, 3, 5
See also Mexico City; Puebla
New World. See Spanish America
Nuevo Cid, El, 154
Nunez de Miranda, Antonio, 50, 58—59, 97—
101, 106, 109, no, 165, 2200.33, 2210.36,
2270.24, 2280.39, 41
nuns, 3, 4, 5, 16, 40, 72, 93, 98—99, 104, 137—38,
160
anthologies of writings by, viii—ix
confessors and. See confessors
enclosure of. See enclosure
indigenous women as, 67
mystic triad and, 81—82, 132, 154
See also specific nuns
obedience, 14, 95, 98—99, 103, 108
Oddon, Ambrosio, 22on.35, 2210.36
O’Gorman, Edmundo, 4—5
Oliva, Maria de, 25—26
Olmedo, Placido de, 73, 82, 183
oral tradition, 147
Oviedo, Juan, 113
Oviedo y Herrera, Count, 29
Pacheco, Francisco, 141, 142
Palacios Berruecos, Juana. See Maria de San
Jose
Palacios Berruecos, Francisca, 74, 81, 84,
2230.13, 226n.i8
Palacios Berruecos, Leonor, 87, 2230.13
Palacios y Solorzano, Luis, 73
Palafox y Mendoza, Juan, 50, 63, 66, 72,
146, 158—59, 2120.29, 2220.49,
2450.76
Palavicino, Francisco Javier, 109—10, 230—
3UU75
Paredes, countess of, 98, 109
Pasamonte, Gine's de, 2420.39
patriarchal society, 133, 152,153, 160
Paul, Saint, 100, 102, 106, 107, 117, 130, 132,
136
Paz, Alvarez de, 37
Paz, Octavio, 95, 109

Pena, Luis de la, 78
penances, Rosa de Lima and, 26—27, 141
Perelmuter, Rosa, 99, 102, 106
Perez de la Torre, Tomas, 87
perfecta letradas, 108
perfecta religiosas, 15, 143, 159, 167
Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 18, 94, 96, 108—
10, 113, 114, 143
Marla de San Jose and, 17, 83, 84
perpetual enclosure. See enclosure
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 148, 160
Peru (viceroyalty)
cross-dressing in, 160—62
idolatrous practices in, 24, 31
printing and publishing in, 3, 5, 25
social flux in, 144—45, 159—63, 165
See also Chile; Lima
Peru (modern), Rosa de Lima as national
identity symbol of, 24, 67, 115, 166
Peter, Saint, 105
Peter of Alcantara, 70, 79, 2240.23
petitions, 147—48, 149, 150, 152, 2440.50
Petroff, Elizabeth, ix, 13
Philip IV, king of Spam, 28, 29, 141, 145
Philip V, king of Spain, 2250.41
ptcaras, 123, 124, 128—34, x53
picaresque genre, 17, 166
Catalina de Erauso and, 19, 148—49, 150,
r52—54, i57. 242n-33
first known work novel of, 124, 127, 152
Ursula Suarez and, 18, 117, 123—35
Pius V, Pope, 2120.37
Pizarro, Francisco, 25
pohtics, 16, 45
Pope, Randolph, 151
popular dialogue genre, 33
Poutrin, Isabel, ix
prayer, 32, 104
proceso apostolico, 24, 28
proceso arzobispal, 24
prophecies, 32, 49, 83
Protestant heretics, n
Protestant Reformation, 7. See also Counter-
Reformation
Protestant women life writers, ix
Puebla (Mexico), 3, 2470.5
Catalina de Erauso and, 146, 158
Catarina de San Juan and, 44, 45, 49—52,
57, 58, 60, 66, 68, 164
Marla de San Jose and, 72, 76, 77, 81
Pumar Martinez, Carmen, 160
Index 271
querelles des femme debate, 107
Quintilian, 100
Rabell, Carmen, 124
race, 51, 66—67
Ramirez, Isabel, 96
Ramos, Alonso, 16, 44, 46—48, 51—63, 65—67,
72, 77, 93, 99, 2170.10, 2200.33,
2210.36
Raymond of Capua, 41, 2240.23
Recollects, 69, 70, 74
relaciones de espiritu, 102
relaciones de meritos, 147—48, 149, 150, 152,
2440.50
religiosa letradas, 18, 96
religious orders, 13, 25. See also specific orders
religious women
Catholic Church and, 12—15, 40—41
colonization and, viii, 3, 15, 19, 42
confessional writings and, vii-ix, 5, 11, 17,
81—82
confessors and, 6, 40, 2150.67
epistolary genre use by, 17, 18, 95, 96, 99—
108
heroic virtue and, 8, 41, 78—79, 141, 143
lay. See beatas
proper behavior expectations for, 94—96,
99, 101, 102
rediscovered and reinterpreted lives of,
166—67
See also nuns; names of specific women
rescripting
actual writings vs., viii, ix, 7, 17
for Catalina de Erauso, 158—59
for Juana Ines de la Cruz, 18, no—15
for Marfa de San Jose, 17, 72, 84, 86—87
for Rosa de Lima, 32—33, 41, 42
for Ursula Suarez, 135
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, La ( Juana Ines de
la Cruz), 17, 50, 94—108,113,133, 2280.43
selection from, 191—98
Ribera, Alonso de, 2460.89
Rivas, Emma, 166
rogues, 149, 151, 152, 153
Rojas, Alejo Fernandez, 136, 2390.103
Roman Catholic Church, vii, viii, 164,
24311.43
cross-dressing prohibition by, 141
devotio moderna and, 7, 37
gender roles and, 7, 25, 106—8, 114, 131, 134
interpretations of holiness by. See sanctity
272 Index
Roman Catholic Church (continued)
New World conquest and colonization
and, 3-5
religious women and, 12—15, 40—41
rescripting process and, viii
sacraments of, ix, 7, 8, 10—xi, 16—17, 32,
243n-43
sainthood process of. See canonization
See also Council of Trent; Counter-
Reformation; Inquisition
Romay, Domingo Sotelo, 2450.77
Romero, Juan Francisco de, 122, 132, 134—35,
13C 137
Rosa de Lima, 23—43, 45> 80, 89, 94, 104, 114,
119, 162
biographical overview of, 25—31
canonization process for, 9, 15—16, 18, 23—
24, 28—29, 32—33, 41, 62, 141, 164, 212—
I3n-39
chronology of, 42—43
La Escala mistica, 36, 39, 40
hagiographic biography of, 16, 24, 29, 31—
42> 45. 95
hagiographic selections, 171—76
Marfa de San Jose and, viii, 70, 73,
2240.24
Las Mercedes, 36, 39, 40
as Peruvian national identity symbol, 24,
67, 115, 166
Rosales, Diego de, 146, 159, 161
Routt, Kristin, 118, 138
Rubial, Antonio, 45, 114
Rubio Merino, Pedro, 147, 244—450.64
sacraments, ix, 7, 8, 10—11, 16—17, 32, 2430.43
saints, 25, 66, 105—6, 2090.18, 2190.9
changing definition for, 31—32
Council of Trent guidelines for, 12, 29, 48,
54. 61
intercessory power of, 7, 12, 32
life stories of, vii, 5. See also hagiographies;
vidas
See also canonization; names of specific saints
Sanchez y Castro, Joseph Geronymo,
2250.37
sanctity
codification of, 6, 7, 8, 45
determination of, 12, 15, 16, 24, 25, 29, 32,
48, 60, 66
women and, 12—13, 15> 94
See also canonization
Santander y Torres, Sebastian, 17, 41, 70, 77,
84, 86, 87, 159, 2230.5
Santiago (Chile), 18, 118, 121, 136—37, 138
Schlau, Stacey, ix, 138
Scott, Karen, ix
Sermon en que se da noticia de la vida.. .de la
Venerable Senora Cbatbarima de San Joan
(Aguilera), 51
sermons, 15, 101
funerary, 4, 44, 77, 87
sexual identity. See gender
sexuality, 127, 128, 141, 153, 156
Sigtienza y Gongora, Carlos de, 62, 93—94,
114, 242n.26
Slade, Carol, ix, 11
Society of Jesus (Jesuits), 19, 67, 155, 2270.31
Catalina de Erauso and, 159
Catarina de San Juan and, 16, 45, 48, 49,
52, 54, 57, 59, 65-66, 99, 159
Rosa de Lima and, 27, 28, 37
Ursula Suarez and, 121, 123
Socolow, Susan Midgden, 160
Solano, Francisco, 2ion-9
soldiers’ tales, 17, 19, 148—53, 155, 157, 166,
2420.37
Song of Songs, The, 40, 51, 159
Sor Juana. See Juana Ines de la Cruz
Sosa, Miguel, 48
Spain, vii, 6, 7, 8, 165
Catalina de Erauso and, 140—41, 143—44,
■45
Catarina de San Juan and, 54, 57
Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 114
Rosa de Lima and, 28, 29
women’s roles in, 160
See also Spanish Inquisition; Teresa of
Avila, Saint
Spanish America, 15—19, 62, 164—66
canonization and, 166. See also Rosa de
Lima
conquest and colonization of, viii, 3—5, 7,
8, 15, 19, 42, 143—44,
frontier social mobility in, 159—63
Inquisition in, 11—12, 16, 24, 33—35, 45—48,
51, 63, 65, no, 136—37, 166, 2i6n.3, 230—
311-1.75
See also New Spain; Peru
Spanish Inquisition, a, 16, 33, 45, 65, 137
Speilberg, Janis van, 27
spiritual autobiographies, 5, 149, 154—57. See
also confessional autobiographies
 Index 273

spirituality, 7, 8, 13, 14, 17, 25 Vega, Lope de, 2440.51

Stations of the Cross, 17, 71, 77, 87, 238^92
Stepto, Michele, 152
storytelling tradition, 147
Suarez, Ines, 160
Suarez, Pedro, 48—49
Suarez, Ursula, 18, 116—39, !43> 145, I52> 154,
157, 2450.71
biographical overview of, 118—23
chronology of, 138—39
Relation autobiografica of, 116—19, 122, 123,
125—36, 138, 164—65, 2380.93
Relation autobiografica selection, 199—200
Suarez del Campo, Francisco, 118
Suarez Montanez, Diego, 2430.46
Surtz, Ronald, ix
Tekakwitha, Catherine, 67
Teresa of Avila, Saint, vii—ix, 14—15, 42, 74,
78, 86, 89, 94, 104—7, 135
autobiography of (Libro de la vida), 11, 14,
40, 59, 80, 83, 102, 155, 2240.23
censorship and, 7
devoto system opposition by, 236n.66
Velasco, Sherry, 148
Vera, Francisco de, 2240.29
Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alferez (Erauso), 141,
146-57, 163
authorship uncertainty of, 147
selections from, 201—8
Vidal, Josep, 2200.35
vidas, 3, 4, 15, 16, 72, 166
Counter-Reformation’s influence on, 8,
124
elements of, 103
epistolary genre and, 17, 18, 96, 99
imitatio Christi as core source of, 6
Juana Ines de la Cruz and, 95, 102
picaresque influences on. See picaresque
genre
two main forms of, vii—viii
See also confessional autobiographies;
hagiographies; spiritual
autobiographies
vidas de soldados. See soldiers’ tales
Vieira, Antonio, 100, 101, 107, 2280.39,
2280.41

epistolary genre and, 100 Vinas, Padre, 130—31, 132, 134—35, 136, 2370.86
Catalina de Erauso and, 162 virtue. See heroic virtue
Marfa de San Jose and, 70, 79, 80 visionaries, women as, 13—14, 44, 102
Rosa de Lima and, 24, 33, 36, 37,38, 40 Marfa de San Jose, 70—71, 75—79, 82, 86—
Ursula Suarez and, 117—18, 123 87, 2240.20
Toral y Valdes, Domingo, 151 See also mystics
Toribio de Mogrovejo, 25, 26, 2ion-9 visions, 32, 224^20
Torre, Raphael de la, 78 Vives, Juan Luis de, 100
Trabulse, Elias, 101, 109, no vos me coegistis, 18, 102, 103—5
transvestites. See cross-dressing
Weber, Alison, ix
Ulloa, Juan Francisco, 136—37 Weinstein, Donald, 13
Urban VII, Pope, 2200.34 Wheelright, Julia, 161
Urban VIII, Pope, 12, 24, 29, 45, 54, 59, 63, witchcraft, 7
141, 2120.37 women’s issues. See gender; religious women
women’s rights movement, 95, 166
Valdes, Andriana, 118 Word of God, vii
Valla, Lorenzo, 100
Vallbona, Rima de, 146, 147, 148, 163, 2450.73 Zarate, Gabriel, 2140.57
van Deusen, Nancy E., 40 Zayas, Marfa de, 134